Beijing a Big Deal for Chris Plys

Chris Plys, the 34-year-old native of Duluth, Minnesota, was itching to get safely to Beijing.

“I feel like I’ve turned into a moderately crazy person with this Covid stuff,” the personable, outgoing Plys said, just a couple of weeks before his departure. “Just because I’ve been really trying to limit exposure to people that I don’t know.”

“I’m hiding away in my house, basically.”

You can’t blame him for feeling that way. Not with so much at stake after such a years-long grind to just get to the Mt. Olympus base camp. And considering, too, the Covid scare Plys went through at last year’s world championship, in Calgary. It’s all enough to make a guy super careful.

“I feel like half the battle to these Olympics is just getting there,” he said.

That was an oh-so-appropriate thing for Chris Plys to say, a sentence that works on two different levels, considering the everyday challenges of staying healthy pre-Games, and the competitive disappointments he’s faced in the past.

You see, curling at the Olympics is a big deal for Plys because while he experienced tons of success as a junior—winning the U.S. Nationals five times, four times as a skip, with a world title in 2008—he then suffered through great drought conditions while trying to replicate that success at the next level.

Shuster’s team was in the way at Olympic Trials, in both 2013 and 2017, as they were at many a U.S. men’s championship, too. Try as he might, Plys had won not a single U.S. men’s title until he joined forces with Shuster, when Tyler George left the team after winning Olympic gold in 2018.

Plys had previously played with Shuster, winning the Winter Universiade in 2007, and serving as an alternate at the 2009 worlds and then again at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. He actually played a series of games in Vancouver, when Shuster was benched by the coach. After that, though, the two parted ways and Plys found himself in the national championship desert.

“There was definitely a point in my career where I was just like, ‘God, if this is if this is going to be it, making (U.S.) finals and not really getting to play anything after, maybe this is just’ … I definitely considered if enough was enough.”

Indeed, Plys had decided to play just a year or two more after losing the trials in 2017, but when Shuster came calling in the spring of 2018, he had a change of heart, and now plans on seeing things through one more Olympic cycle, regardless of how things turn out in Beijing.

Plys said he threw 40 or 50 rocks a day, by himself, earbuds in, whenever he found the Duluth Curling Club to be empty. Sometimes, he threw fewer rocks, simply because too many people started to file in to take their own slides. Plys kept his distance, with echoes from last year’s world championship still lingering.

The Shuster squad had finished the round robin at the 2021 worlds with a record of 10-3, good for third place, and a playoff match-up with Switzerland looming. Things were grooving. “It was getting to the point at the end of the week where the game just felt kind of kind of easy, which is, at a world championship, all you could ever ask for,” Plys remembered.

But a knock on Plys’ hotel door threw things into disarray. A doctor informed him that he’d tested positive for Covid. The next 24 hours were a blur of doubt and fear, and puzzlement. How could he have gotten Covid in the tight, careful curling bubble that was in place?

He didn’t have Covid, though. The test turned out to be a false positive, thankfully. But the chaos that ensued forced a postponement of the U.S.-Switzerland game for a day, and Plys was originally barred from participating. Three negative tests later, though, he was given the green light, just prior to the game beginning. Switzerland beat the U.S., 7-6, to end Team Shuster’s run.

“Tough break,” said Plys, who now sees the episode as one that might have knit the Shuster squad together more tightly.

“Facing that kind of adversity moving forward into something like the Olympics, I think, could be a really beneficial thing for us,” he said.

If the joy of playing has returned for Plys, it’s not just because he’s made it to two world championships and now the Olympics with Shuster’s squad. Plys may have always been seen by outsiders as a relaxed, take-it-as-it-comes kind of guy, but he insists it was not always that
way. Inside, he roiled over his curling failures.

“When I was younger, I put so much pressure on myself in getting results and kind of identified solely as a curler,” Plys said. “As I’ve gotten older I don’t really identify myself as a curler anymore. Curling is something that I do.”

And so, Plys said, he has grown legitimately into the person that people had earlier decided he already was. “I feel like I have I put a lot a lot of work into becoming more of a person like that.”

Plys, his mixed doubles partner Vicky Persinger and their coaches were having a ball in the early days of Beijing, posting up a storm on social media. The sheer volume of posts have slowed since competition began, but the connectivity for family and friends back home is still there.

That doubles partnership has opened new doors of growth for him as well. The five-rock, two-player game has been an eye-opener.

“It’s absolutely kind of just cemented the enjoyment that I’m having,” said Plys of his experiences in playing with Persinger. “We just have a lot of fun together and it’s very relaxed, very easygoing.”

But it’s a grind, too, as Plys notes. The nature of doubles as opposed to the team game provides different challenges. There’s that whole shooting, then getting up and chasing your own rock to sweep it kind of thing.

“It’s pushed the physical side of it for me,” he said of doubles. “I notice myself feeling a bit more beat up after mixed doubles than I do in men’s. Not mentally but definitely physically.”

Plys prepare for that physical slog, even if Covid restrictions kept him out of the gym. An outdoorsman who loves things like fishing and hiking, Plys took to the streets of Duluth on his fat-tire bike, pumping his legs through the Minnesota snow, perhaps mulling over ideas for a new tattoo.

He revealed that, actually, he already has Olympic rings on his body, having incorporated the symbol into an existing tattoo after his 2010 experience.

“Maybe there’ll be a funny moment,” he mused. “Or a funny story that I can kind of turn into a tattoo for this one.”