Yes, Batteries and Broken Circuits Are Major Issues For Olympic Curling
Images via NBCUniversal, Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
Electrical engineering definitely isn’t the first thing anyone thinks of when the sport of curling comes to mind. Harnessing friction to make pinpoint shots and the sheer amount of screaming while doing so definitely pop to mind first. But the tiny LEDs atop the curling stones have become an unignorable topic during the curling events at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Every curling stone used at the Games is fitted with a governance system called Eye of the Hog which automates officiating of one of curling’s only infractions, hog line violations. Every shot in curling must be released from a player’s hand before it crosses the bold red hog line or else the stone is removed from play.
The Eye of the Hog system keeps players honest by utilizing magnets under the ice, heat sensors in the stone handle and red and green LEDs mounted in the stone’s casing to complete a circuit monitoring stone release. Green means good. Red means bad. It’s a pretty easy system on the whole that has kept players honest at major curling tournaments since 2003.
But the system hasn’t performed well at the Beijing Games. Technical failures in nearly every single curling match have seen lights malfunction or simply not work at all, forcing players to throw up an “X” sign with their arms and summon a human official to monitor their shot, the exact thing Eye of the Hog was invented to replace.
Players have shown visible frustration with the stones at times. “It’s a massive distraction,” Canadian women’s curling team member Jennifer Jones told the Toronto Star. “You lose lots of time because you have to reset and then your clock runs. So you lose time on top of having to go through your whole routine again.”
The issue came to a head on Monday when the World Curling Federation, which governs the Olympic curling competition, announced that it was suspending use of the system as a whole midway through the men’s and women’s round-robin tournament. “The handles currently in use will remain in place on the stones. However, the electronic surveillance will be disconnected,” the WCF said in a statement.