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Sunday, February 14, 2010

Armchair Olympics 3

The armchair Olympic curling blogger is not short of things to read and watch these days. Mike Haggerty is now in Vancouver and he will be reporting on Team GB's games for the Royal Club in the days ahead. His preview is here.

I'm not a betting man, but I found my way to betfair.com to look at the odds. Very interesting, but I wasn't tempted! Mike Haggerty has been writing for that site's blog. You can find his contributions to date here and here.

It is interesting how other pundits think our teams will do. SWEEP magazine online has descriptions of all the competing teams, and suggests that Eve Muirhead and the girls will finish the round robin on six wins and three losses. We'll take that!

The Curling News is in Vancouver too, and George Karrys has already featured Olympic items on his blog here, although even more goes online if you follow the magazine's Twitter feeds!

It is interesting too to find out a little of how other teams and other countries see their role in communicating with fans. There's an interview with Tracy Sachtjen, the USA alternate, here, which gives an insight into life inside the US women's curling team. Natalie Nicholson, the lead, has been contributing to a blog here. It is not surprising that the team has its own fan page on Facebook, here.

Talking about curling in the USA, did you know that one of their association's sponsors is Laphroaig whisky. The detail is here.

The media interest in the two GB curling teams in the past few months has been intense. Some journalists have certainly been doing their homework, and looking behind the PR output. An example is Barney Roney's Guardian article here.

'Curling has come a long way from Housework on Ice' could not be more true.

It seems just yesterday that few south of the border knew even that the sport of curling existed. How exciting then to see the sport being used in a political cartoon in the Telegraph, below!

The paper's comment cartoon archive is here.