By Aadi Nair
Jan 5 (Reuters) - World Curling President Beau Welling wants to sweep away the sport's Olympics-only tag and slide into a new era where fans are engaging with it throughout the year.
Curling,
which originated in Scotland and is hugely popular in Canada, made its debut as an Olympic sport at the 1924 Games in Chamonix but was not part of the official programme again until 1998 at Nagano, which brought it to a worldwide audience.
The governing body's membership has risen to 77 associations from 28 since Nagano, but while curling is becoming more popular outside traditional winter sports strongholds it experiences peaks and troughs of interest in a pattern pegged to the Games.
"There's a lot of excitement and viewership around the globe every four years, and one of the things we're working hard to do is trying to figure out how to make curling more accessible to a broader audience in between the Olympics," Welling told Reuters.
"We have our own very rapidly growing OTT platform, the Curling Channel. A fundamentally important strategic goal of ours is to get eyeballs on curling. We're working really hard to do that.
"We're very proud of our sport, a value-based sport with integrity and honesty. You call your own fouls, so sportsmanship is something that's very much lauded. In our mission to try to grow the sport, we want to grow our culture as well."
REVAMPED WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS
In October, World Curling announced an overhaul of its competition structure with the annual world championships expanding to 18 teams from 13 beginning in the 2026-27 season.
The revamped structure will introduce a B-Division comprising 16 women's and 16 men's teams, as well as regional C-Division championships - split into the Europe and Pan-Continental regions.
There will also be a system of promotion and relegation between the divisions.
Welling said these changes were enacted to make the sport more accessible.
"We see this as opening up curling to everyone, but also to newer, non-traditional countries," he added.
"There's a real definite pathway to get to Olympic qualification points, whereas the old system, I wouldn't say it was a closed shop, but it was more difficult to break through. Now that pathway is going to be much clearer.
"I think on the development side we very much want curling to grow, and we want it to grow in terms of curlers, but also fans, as well as the development of these newer member associations."
FROM THE LINKS TO THE RINKS
Welling is a golf course designer by trade and his company was involved in the design of the virtual green used in the TGL, the tech-infused indoor golf league formed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.
The South Carolina native first became interested in curling when it was held as a demonstration sport at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.
That led to him travelling to the 2006 U.S. National Championships in Bemidji, Minnesota as a fan, where he was immediately embraced by the curling community.
A few months later he was asked to join the U.S. Curling board, setting him on a journey which would culminate in him being appointed president of World Curling in September 2022.
"I'm from the state of South Carolina, where there's no ice really, we just put ice in our drinks. I just personally was fascinated watching the sport on television," Welling said.
"Ultimately, the more I watched on television, the more fascinated I got. I come from the world of golf. I design golf courses.
"It turns out that curling and golf are both ancient Scottish sports. There's something about that which was a part of the appeal."
(Reporting by Aadi Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
