GANGNEUNG, South Korea — Thomas Ulsrud lifts weights, hammers through squats and hangs upside down from metal bars, molding his abdominal muscles with a sadistic series of crunches.
“I guess I was blessed a little from nature’s side,” Ulsrud said, “but I do like to work out.”
None of this would be all that unusual except that Ulsrud is a 46-year-old curler.
Obliterating the sport’s tired reputation as ground zero for paunchy, beer-swilling weekend warriors, curlers like Ulsrud, who is back at the Olympics for the third time with Norway, are representative of a growing emphasis on fitness — for men and women alike. They bench press, bang out bicep curls and lay off the sauce.
Some, like Ulsrud and Marc Kennedy, a Canadian Olympian, have gone so far as to showcase their physiques in racy promotional calendars for the sport.
“It kind of goes to show you just how far curling has come,” said Kennedy, 36, who posed shirtless while doing yoga with two curling stones for the cover of the 2018 Men of Curling Calendar.
Brian McWilliams, head trainer for USA Curling, said that when he joined the organization in 2006, he discovered that he was responsible for conditioning players who were still smoking cigarettes during fifth-end breaks, which is the equivalent of halftime.
“I was like, ‘What did I just get myself into?'” McWilliams said.
But curling, the sport that involves using brooms to direct a heavy granite rock down a sheet of ice, has joined the CrossFit age. Phill Drobnick, coach of the U.S. men, said he suspected that this was the first Olympics in which every team in the field had bought into a fitness program in the run-up to the games.
“In the past, if you were a good shotmaker, you could be pretty good and still be successful,” said Aileen Geving, who plays for the U.S. women’s team. “But the game has gotten so precise: The ice is better, and the players have gotten better. Any bit of edge is going to make a difference. So if fitness is that difference, you’re going to work for it.”
Joanne Courtney, 28, who is competing for Canada and has a reputation as one of the strongest sweepers in the world, has worked with a trainer in Edmonton to add muscle mass to her upper body. The more weight she has over the broom, she said, the more downward pressure she can apply to the ice.
She also does interval training — on treadmills and rowing machines — to hone her anaerobic fitness and her explosiveness. She does the bulk of her training in the summer.
“That’s where I try to build as much muscle as I possibly can,” she said.
Sweeping is important because it heats the ice while creating micro-scratches on the surface, which helps players control for distance and trajectory as the rock travels down the sheet.
As for Ulsrud, he said he began to focus on weight training in his mid-30s as a way of sustaining his career. He guided the Norwegians to the silver medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics and to a world championship in 2014. Ulsrud now makes it a point, he said, to outperform his younger teammates in their various conditioning tests.
The sport clearly has changed.
“It used to be older people, drinking beer all night,” Ulsrud said. “And those were the best players! You’d meet them at the bar.”
About that calendar: It features elite curlers in various states of undress — including Ulsrud, who posed in his underwear with his teammates for the month of December.
The photo shoot was on the second floor of a busy restaurant in Oslo. The lunchtime crowd was riveted.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Hey, if we have a dinner party, can you guys come over and serve?'” Ulsrud said.
The calendar is the work of George Karrys, owner and publisher of the Curling News, an industry bible based in Toronto. Karrys said he had nearly sold out of the 10,000 copies he had printed, with the net proceeds going to various charities. This is the second edition. Bowing to public demand after he had published several calendars featuring female curlers, Karrys came out with the first Men of Curling Calendar in 2014. (Ulsrud was in that one, too.)
“It was pretty explosive,” said Karrys, a former Olympic curler for Canada.
Karrys lets the curlers follow through on their own artistic visions. For the latest calendar, Ulsrud and his three teammates chose a holiday dinner tableau, with Havard Vad Petersson posing like a roasted pig with an apple in his mouth.
“He drew the short straw,” Ulsrud said.
The target audience is no secret.
“You get a lot of the older ladies up in Alberta or Saskatchewan who are just going to buy those things up,” said John Landsteiner, a member of the U.S. men’s team.
Neither Landsteiner nor any of his U.S. teammates are featured in the calendar — “We’re not exactly the beefcakes,” said John Shuster, a four-time Olympian and the team’s leader — but they were no less focused on making gains (or losses, as the case may be) in the weight room before the games.
After Shuster labored to a last-place finish alongside his teammates at the 2014 Winter Olympics, he made big changes. He worked on his conditioning, refined his diet and dropped about 35 pounds. As a result, he said, he has more energy, no longer feels jet lag after long flights and can power through tournaments.
Known as the skip, Shuster orchestrates the game plan and throws the most important shots, leaving most of the sweeping duties to his teammates. But at the U.S. mixed doubles trials in December, Schuster had to sweep — and sweep a lot, grinding through 10 matches over five days with his partner, Cory Christensen.
“I couldn’t have done that four years ago,” Shuster said.
When Karrys won a silver medal with the Canadian men’s team at the 1998 Winter Olympics, curling was making its debut at the Olympics. Karrys, who played alongside an electrician, a plumber and a golf pro, said he was the only member of his team who worked out.
“I knew there would be comparisons between curlers and real athletes from these other Olympic sports,” Karrys said in a telephone interview. “So I wanted to not only be able to perform to the best of my ability and help my team out, but I also wanted to not look terrible while I was doing it.”
In the 20 years since, curling has benefited from a slow but steady influx of funding from sponsors and national federations — and from greater exposure, too. Those who hope to reach the highest levels face more competition than ever. Many still have day jobs, but they also have high-performance coaches and regimented training schedules.
For the curlers vying for medals here in Gangneung, the Olympics are a marathon that demand endurance. Pool play for the men’s and women’s events stretches over eight days, with each team playing nine matches — and then tiebreakers, semifinals and medal rounds to follow.
“You need to be as fit as possible so that you can approach that very last stone to win the championship the same way that you did several days earlier, with the first stone of the competition,” Karrys said. “And if you’re physically dragging, everything drags — all the strategic aspects, all the actual execution of throwing the stone.”
Now, more than ever, a lot of that hard work happens in advance, at gyms far from the ice.
“You’ve got to take care of the body,” Ulsrud said, “like all the sports.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Entertainment: Olympic curlers are buff now, and have the calendars to prove it
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