16 Track 16

Unit 6

The Olympics

Chapter 2

Unusual Olympic Sports

page 75

Unusual Olympic Sports

For many people, the Olympic Games consist of popular sports like swimming, running, or ice skating.

Here are three unusual Olympic events, and three athletes who fell in love with them.

Curling

Curling is a sport that is played on ice. Two teams of four players each slide eight stones along the ice to a colored circle (called the house).

The object of the game is to place a stone closest to the center of the house.

“I started curling very young,” Canadian Olympic curler Sammy McCann told us. “My father managed a hotel with an ice rink. As soon as the people left the ice, my friends and I would get right on and start curling.”

Trampoline

Kids have been jumping on trampolines for almost a hundred years, but it was only at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney that trampoline became an official Olympic sport.

In Olympic competitions, each trampoline gymnast is judged on ten different skills.

A gymnast can score well by showing that they can control their bodies while jumping high and twisting and flipping smoothly in the air.

“I love the sport. I’ve been doing it since I was five years old,” said Jennifer Parrilla, American trampoline gymnast.

After Jennifer competed in the 2000 Olympics (as the only American trampoline gymnast), she got a tattoo of a butterfly to remind her of her “new beginnings” as an Olympian.

Skeleton

The sport of skeleton racing first became an Olympic sport in 1928. Skeleton racers slide down an icy course at very high speed on a simple sled.

The sled is called a skeleton because early sleds looked like human skeletons. “I didn’t start skeleton until I was 30,” said American skeleton racer Zach Gail.

“While driving, my girlfriend and I took a wrong turn at Lake Placid, New York; that’s where the 1980 Winter Olympics took place.

They were offering skeleton classes that afternoon. My girlfriend said, ‘why don’t we give it a try? It was fun! I fell in love with it.”