Cortina awakens to embrace competitive curling couples and Vonn’s valiant gold bid

The sun rises late in Cortina d’Ampezzo, like everything else in this little alpine town. It’s gone eight o’clock in the morning by the time the daylight has made it over the high peaks to the east, and it’s another two hours from that before the Olympic day gets under way.

It’s slow out, as if everyone’s still sleeping off the night before, when the town was out cheering for the athletes as they made their parade around the square. The police are still packing away all the railings, and the street sweeps are brushing up the confetti. Non c’è fretta. No one’s in a rush. Maybe your bus will turn up, but no one’s making any promises.

Fortunately, you don’t need it for the curling, which is only a short walk. They built this arena for the last Olympics here, back in 1956, when it was the venue for the figure skating competition and, like everything else around town, it’s looking very well-dressed. It’s all bare wood and black and white photographs from the 1950s.

All the set dressing in Cortina has an art deco touch, the place happily back in another era, before anyone had to worry about the 21st century. It feels like a town time forgot, and which the financial crisis didn’t touch. Louis Vuitton is here, so is Prada. There’s a pop-up Dior store with an eight-foot ice sculpture out front.

There are two curling fixtures at 10am, round-robin matches in the mixed doubles, two Swedish siblings are playing a married couple from Switzerland in one, and the Great British pair of Bruce Mouat and Jenn Dodds are playing another married couple from Canada on the other. The Canadians, Brett Gallant and Jocelyn Peterman, started dating after they decided to form a team to try to qualify for the Olympics in Pyeongchang eight years ago. There are a lot of married couples competing in mixed curling. Must be something in all that frozen water.

“Harder!” Peterman screams at Gallant as he vigorously pumps his broom, “Harder! Keep going! Keep going! Yes! Yes!” It doesn’t do them any good. Everyone else might still be figuring out what’s what on day one, but the curlers have been here for almost a week already.

Their competitions run on so long that this one started on the Wednesday before the opening ceremony, and Mouat and Dodds have been dominating the competition. They had already won all their first five matches and after Mouat put them 3-0 with his hammer in the very first end against Canada, it was clear their winning streak was about to reach six. They eventually won 7-5.

Mouat is the most-feared competitor in the sport. The 31-year-old is the one all the others talk about in awed whispers. The day before, Snoop Dogg asked him for a selfie. “I’ve heard about you,” Snoop told him. Later on, Mouat and Dodds beat the previously undefeated USA duo 8-6, too, which means they have already qualified for the semi-finals. “How many times are they playing today?” asked a German photographer when they came back out on to the ice. “And twice more tomorrow, too,” I told him. “Christ,” he replied. “This is worse than cricket.”

Tune in again on Tuesday evening, when they will be playing for medals. Till then, the women’s skiathlon is three hours’ drive in one direction, the women’s ski jump three hours in another and the ice hockey, figure skating and freestyle skiing in other parts of the country altogether.

But the women’s alpine is only a 15-minute bus ride out of town up into the mountains. They’re holding the third, and last, day of training runs before the women’s downhill. It’s not immediately clear that the skiing set and the curling community are a part of the same species, let alone the same sporting event. Curling is the slowest, most meditative sport in the Olympics and despite the best efforts of a gaggle of four enthusiastic Swiss, was taking place almost entirely in silence.

Up on the mountain, they’re pumping out House of Pain over the public address system while the women come screaming down the mountain at the sort of speeds that make you nauseous from watching.

They had to cancel the first day of training because of the weather, and the fog is closing in again on Saturday, but they have time to get a handful of racers away. Everyone wants to see Lindsey Vonn, competing in her final Olympics after coming out of a five-year retirement. The 41-year-old American is racing in a brace after she ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee last week. An ACL is apparently something she can get by fine without.

She finished in 1min 38.28sec, third fastest on the day, behind her USA teammate Breezy Johnson. There was a moment when her knee buckled on an early jump. Everyone watching winced in worry. But Vonn sped on. She didn’t even seem to stop to steady herself.

There may not be another sport out there where the competitors are brushing up as close against the edge of what’s possible as they seem to do in downhill skiing. Vonn’s contest against Johnson, Germany’s Emma Aicher and the great Italian Sofia Goggia, who won gold back in 2018, may just be the great race of the entire Games.

Better viewing, for sure, than the men’s singles luge competition back down at the sliding centre. They finished this just in time for the Games, but no one seems to have got around to building any of the facilities around it. So the crowd tumbled up and down the hill looking for a spot to stand and watch from.

For such a fast sport, it’s a very slow watch. Which might be why everyone who knows what they’re doing has started drinking already. There were two races and the competition stretched on long into the evening as the sun started to dip down back into the valley over the other side of the mountain, the way things seem around here, the nights just might be the busiest time of day.

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