Schoolboy's Own Stuff: You Can Keep Your Slopestyle - The Best Thing At The Winter Olympics Is Curling

Ah the Winter Olympics, the home of the elegant, the dangerous and the downright daft. Predictably for an event which largely consists of people sliding down or across frictionless particles of frozen water Sochi 2014 has been a veritable festival of sub-zero speed.

Certainly this fortnight it’s the freestyle skiiers and boarders who so far have collected the headlines with their flips and tricks and endless whooping.

For my money though you can keep their backside 1080s, Tomahawks and Slopestyle because the most fascinating action has not been whizzing down a mountain but on the more sedate surroundings of the curling sheets.

The game itself is a perfect combination of tactics and skill, one of those wonderful sports that looks deliciously uncomplicated at first – skid a stone down some ice towards a target (called the house), closest wins – but deceptively difficult and when played by the experts imbued with a complexity that brings it closer to chess than bowls.

Firstly there’s the clue in the sport’s name. With each stone having a handle with which one releases it while sliding, the rotation of each stone causes it to 'curl', making aim more difficult for the beginner but allowing experienced players to bend correctly weighted stones in behind others, with the a clockwise or anti-clockwise rotation determining the direction.

Then there’s the precision required. Despite a ‘sheet’ being 45m long, with stones traveling the best part of that. Those strange brushes one can joke about – they’re there because often centimetres matter and brushing can change the course or weight of a stone by enough to change the course of an entire match.

If that wasn’t enough tactical sophistication there’s the influence on the game of having the last stone in each end– Olympic curlers are so good that they’re as likely to miss a clear shot at knocking a stone away as a golfer is to miss a one foot putt. This, and the fact that the loser of each end gets last stone advantage in the next end makes curling a complex game of cat and mouse in which you aim to trap your opponents into not capitalising on that advantage with various tactics.

Britain's female curling team (L-to-R: Eve Muirhead, Anna Sloan, Vicki Adams and Claire Hamilton)

Those who've had the privilege have seen all this by following the exploits of Eve Muirhead and Dave Murdoch’s British teams through to the semi-finals all this creates a game of ill-concealed tension in which skill, decision making and nerve are constantly put to the test over three hours of stone-cold passive sporting aggression.

The men made it through to their semi-final on the very last stone of a play-off, while they and their female counterparts have been involved in several matches which have turned on one fractional mistake or moment of brilliance magnified into a change in momentum.

All this makes curling a real joy for the sporting connoisseur; a game for those who appreciate the ebb and flow of a test match, the punch and counter-punch of two golfers battling for a major (interestingly Muirhead, the British team’s skip could well have become a pro-golfer), or football’s tactical subtleties rather than its Youtube moments.

Spectators can sit back and indulge themselves in a game that slowly unfolds into carefully reasoned tactical calls and the rhythmic soothing noise of the stones as they collide and decide their caster's destiny.

Sadly for those of us who see long cylinders of wood as telegraph polls rather than cabers who want to take up the game, it’s not exactly an easy option to nip down our local curling rink. You can count the number of active English curling clubs on one hand.

Having played it myself though, strongly resembling a drunken dolphin while doing so, I can say that like golf it retains its joy even when you lack the expertise to pull off the shots that our Olympians make easily, but like its faster winter cousins the game will undoubtedly struggle for attention outside its quadrennial showcase (at least outside Scotland).

Which is a tremendous shame because we could do much worse than embrace it as our national winter sport – a tactical test of character that doesn’t require a trip to France to find a suitable mountain.

Although the curlers will likely get a congratulations from the Prime Minister should they win, if our Olympic sporting legacy is anything to go by (a huge drop in amateur sport participation, even as elite sport funding remains strong) we shouldn’t hold our breath for anything resembling animation.

Until the wider UK embraces curling in a way that encourages larger participation though one can do much worse over the next two days than whiling away a spare hour listening to dulcet Scottish cries of “hard” as stone by stone and inch by inch fascinating battles are played out on the ice.

Perhaps the BBC should consider making it a more regular experience too with tournaments outside the Olympics, it's a lot more exciting than bowls, even without Barry from Eastenders.