Our last wild night in Turin, the End

Ok, I've got to get to the end of this story. It's taking longer than 10,000 meters of speedskating.

So after Wise's concert, I went back downstairs to hang out with what I thought was the Dutch curling team. Several of the guys, including Oblong, had already left. Maarten and Dries and Michael, their coach, were still there.

Frankly, I've spent the last hour or so trying to figure out if these guys really are the Dutch curling team, or if they just have shirts to that effect. I've been unable to figure it out. They've been all over the U.S. media this week, which I didn't realize, but that might just be because of their shirts. I only have four of their names, but I can't find those four names on any European World Championship rosters from the past few years. Does anyone out there actually know anything about Dutch curling? Are these guys just scamming the U.S. press?

So the whole night just got a lot less exciting. First, I'm not really sure if those guys were the Dutch curling team. Second, my research revealed that they've been glomming onto U.S. writers all Olympics. (See Orlando Sentinel, deadspin.com, the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, and so on. Third, their dramatic early-morning revelation--that they were the nutso Dutch fans who were kicked out of the Shani-Hottie press conference for heckling Chad--has been reported to death, and hence is not even the least bit dramatic, and maybe I would have known that if I hadn't been spending so much time at the Holland House. What a downer.

And if they're not really the Dutch curling team, it's not quite as funny when their coach says "I try to limit their drinks but I'm not very successful at that. That's the good thing about curling: you can drink, you can smoke, hopefully not too much."

If they're not really the Dutch curling team, it's not quite as funny when some guy supposedly named Maarten says "Do you know darts? It's the same thing. Otherwise the tension is too much. You don't want the shaking hand. The same thing with billiards. All these precision sports. Everybody says it's a sport for wussies, not a real sport, but nobody knows the tension."

If they're not really the Dutch curling team, I don't know if I even care about their explanation for supporting Shani instead of the Hottie.

"Ok, the real reason is Shani is one of the very few guys who are just authentic," was what Maarten said. "He's not commercial. He doesn't care about that. He's just doing his thing and that's why we love him. He does what he wants to. We hate fake and phony, all the guys who are not like Shani." (If they're not really the Dutch curling team, how great is this "fake and phony" quote?)

If they're not really the Dutch curling team, it's not nearly as interesting when they say that they'd rather be speedskaters but they're no good at speedskating, or that curling was their sport of last resort, or that they were forgoing today's men's gold medal curling game to go to the 10,000 meters speedskating event, where Style writer Libby Copeland and loving roommate Les actually saw them getting kicked out of the arena for trying to sneak into Chad Hedrick's press conference, where they would presumably have heckled him again, whether or not they actually are the Dutch curlers.

(Quick aside: After the end of the curling round robin early this week, some reporters asked a bunch of curlers who didn't advance for their gold medal predictions. At this point, Canada was still playing the U.S. in the final round robin game; if Canada won, they advanced, and if Canada lost, there would be a tiebreaker. One curler, and I don't remember who it was, said that if there were a tiebreaker, he thought the winner of the tiebreaker would go on to win gold, because so much of curling is about momentum. There was no tiebreaker, as it turned out. But Canada's win over the U.S. in that final game essentially was a tiebreaker, so this curler turned out to be pretty prescient. If he actually was a curler.)

Man, this really has me depressed. If you can't trust guys drinking beer in the Holland House at 2 in the morning, whom can you trust? Clearly the only response is to head back to the Holland House tonight with the Dutch curling rosters I've printed off from past European championships and demand to see some identification.

This could wind up as the No. 1 scandal of the Olympics. The thing is, they spoke passionately about curling, about how the Swedish women's win in extra ends yesterday was such positive publicity for their sport, and about how it was such a beautiful final, and about their drive to make it to Vancouver in 2010. So maybe I've now falsely accused them of being scammers. Sigh. Let's hope this all gets cleared up tomorrow.

By Dan Steinberg |  February 24, 2006; 3:57 PM ET
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