Wild Winter Sports

Something just seems to happen to people when it gets cold outside. Maybe it’s cabin fever. Maybe it’s lack of sunlight. But whatever the reason, winter seems to have inspired some of the zaniest activities known to human kind. Curling is a strange sport that began in Scotland 500 years ago. It has since gained a widespread following. For instance, all you have to do is type “curling rink” into the search bar of 411 Canada, Canada’s online yellow pages, to see that Canadians curl in nearly every province. Curling is played on a strip of ice with a target at the end. Teams slide stones towards the target with a broom, which is used to brush the ice in front of the stone. The team that scores the highest is the one that moves their stones closest to the center of the target. Shovel racing is another weird winter sport. Although apparently not as popular as curling, (411 Canada has no listings for shovel racing clubs or equipment), it does have a small following in North America. Shovel racing is exactly what it sounds like: riding downhill on the blade of a snow shovel. Skiing, that fine old art of zooming along with strips of wood attached to your feet, has also seen its fair share of odd innovations. Ski biking and blade running are giving skiers an additional adrenaline rush. A ski bike is a bicycle with skis instead of wheels. You move downhill by controlling the skis from your bicycle seat–the front ski is moved by the handle bars, and the back ski by the movement of your hips. In blade running, the skis aren’t really even necessary. Participants jump out of a plane and, with parachute deployed, run a slalom course in the air. All this just goes to show that anywhere there’s snow, ice, and freezing temperatures, there are silly sports.