Curling Mixes Things Up

There are four sports making their debut at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games and the first one up this week is mixed curling. Unlike traditional curling, which is divided into men’s and women’s disciplines, each featuring four players, mixed curling is a team of one man and one woman throwing stones and sweeping with the same goal of getting theirs closest to the middle.

The International Olympic Committee has been making an intentional push to feature more events of mixed gender. These Games feature a number of those events as well, including another of the debut events, an alpine team event. (The other two new events on the program are big air snowboard and mass-start speedskating.)

Curling has been a hit at the Olympics in recent years and the addition of the mixed event was met with great reaction from the sold-out crowds at the Gangneung Curling Center.