Historic World Curling Congress in Montreal

A record 13 people are vying for election to or within World Curling’s board of directors when the organization hosts its annual congress in Montreal this week.

Board meetings start on Sept. 3, with the election scheduled during the Annual General Assembly on Sept. 8.

The board will declare two Vice-Presidents (four-year term) plus two Board positions (four-year term).

Current Vice-Presidents Hugh Millikin (Australia) and Graham Prouse (Canada) as well as Director Toyo Ogawa (Japan) have all reached their maximum term of office, and will depart following Montreal.

The list of candidates for curling’s highest global management office is varied. Nine men and four women are in contention—the latter group includes an Olympic champion—but no less than 11 different member nations are represented.

Only one candidate is a non-curler, but he has the backing of the world’s top high-performance competitors. Canada’s Nic Sulsky is co-founder of The Curling Group, the new owners of the Grand Slam of Curling event series which kicks off its new season Oct. 1 in Charlottetown, PEI.

Another candidate is attracting interest for two reasons. Jeff Lutz is affiliated with three member associations—he is an American curler and club member in Canada who represents Israel, winners of men’s silver at the recent European C Championships at Dumfries, Scotland.

The second reason is that Lutz thinks the Roaring Game is in trouble, and he’s not shy in saying so leading up to the Sept. 8 vote.

“What are people saying?” asked Lutz. “They’re saying ‘our sport is great, vote for me.’ I’m saying, wait a second. That’s not good enough for where our sport needs to be today, and we cannot fail at Cortina 2026.

“We are already failing.”

Lutz points to functional operational issues with curling, such as facilities. “We have an infrastructure problem,” Lutz said. “New curling facilities cost a boatload of money, and our sport is not a big money sport.”

The six-time world playdown competitor also points to public World Curling documents that paint a troubling picture of rising expenditures, falling revenues and recent difficulties attracting championship event hosts, including direct world qualifiers (the European and Pan Continental championships).

“And if you speak to other candidates, everything is fine,” said Lutz.

Lutz’ professional background is in public relations and communications, and he spotted something few others did during the recent Olympic (summer) Games.

“I saw curling trending around Paris,” said Lutz.

“If you look deeper, people equate automatically in their heads—we’re talking commentators, and I would say nascent fans—they equate curling to the Olympics, which is awesome. It’s awesome that we have that level of connection.

“The challenge is that as we had thousands of mentions of curling each day, World Curling was silent. Because of that (member associations) were silent; Curling Canada was silent. Because they didn’t have that data in front of them. They didn’t know what was happening.”

Lutz also fears a day when a top-ranked European squad opts out of the glossy but money-losing European Championships in favour of another tournament, such as a Grand Slam event.

“We are so close to that right now,” declared Lutz. “It’s our version of LIV golf, in many ways.”

Speaking of golf, Lutz points to that sport’s recent Creator Classic for potential inspiration—a one-of-a-kind tournament and first collaboration between the PGA TOUR and golf content creators.

“Fascinating,” he said. “Golf creators. Those are influencers that are building a flywheel effect of increased exposure.

“Curling doesn’t have any influencers. Players try to be their own influencers, and it’s terrible. We need athletes to be the best athletes they can be; we shouldn’t expect 85 things from our athletes. So we need to build the influencer layer for them.

“We also need to build the commentator layer. And we need to build media sources like The Curling News to be brought into the fold where they can pull from commentators, and pull from influencers.

“We need an army, and we have… maybe a pen right now.”