Curling Deserves Greener Pastures

Teams everywhere are getting closer to the Olympics, so let’s stay on topic and discuss colors.

A plurality of the world’s favorite color is blue. A number of surveys have come to this same conclusion, and this YouGov survey, which polled internationally, is a good example. The second most popular color is usually either red or green.

This pattern runs true in sports: so many uniforms have blue or red as the dominant hue. There’s data that indicates teams who wear red uniforms tend to win more often than teams that don’t, because the psyche of the athletic mind is a bizarre case study.

Red and blue are also the two most dominant world flag colors if you don’t count white, and you shouldn’t. And of all the curling countries in the last Olympics, only two of the countries didn’t have red: Sweden and Finland, who at least had blue.

I watched last month’s cumbersomely-named Canadian Curling Trials Direct-Entry Event and Canadian Curling Pre-Trials Direct-Entry Event streamed by Curling Canada from Ottawa’s RA Centre, a new venue for the sport. The first thing I noticed was the houses. They were blue and green. I enjoyed that. It wasn’t your traditional green, rather a lighter shade intended for glow-in-the-dark curling, sadly not during this event.

But they reminded me of the 2010 Olympic curling competition in Vancouver, the only Olympics that took a departure from standard red-and-blue houses. (You could say 2018’s Olympics in South Korea used a bit more of an aquamarine, but blue is blue.) And every single Olympics used red and yellow stones. In many clubs, you also see red and blue stones. Sometimes blue and yellow. You rarely see green, but they do sell them.

While the sheet of ice certainly has a board game feel to it, I started thinking about all the different classic board games. Candy Land. Sorry. Trouble. Parcheesi. Simon. So many of them go with the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow, with green thrown in there for some reason, perhaps for variance.

There’s a long and winding discussion on the tabletop website BoardGameGeek for why these four colors are the most prevalent. As it happens with nerds talking to each other a bunch, it took a long time but nothing conclusively was decided. It was the Kevin Koe of online discussions.

But whatever the reason, RYBG just works as a palette. It’s why the 2010 Games may have been the most aesthetically pleasing, and why the poorly-named and never-again-taking-place Canadian Trials qualifiers looked so good. When it comes to those four colors, every sheet of ice should pick two colors, and use two other ones for the houses. Do not double up on red or blue. You’ll thank me later.

For example, Marc Bulger’s new curling rink in Nashville has green and yellow stones with green and orange houses. But with rinks popping up all over the states, it’s time to consider bold color schemes. If you don’t, then I’ll … still visit your club, but take fewer pictures.