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Don't take curling for granite - 2010 Olympics - Yahoo! Sports
VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Jutting its rounded self from the waters off the west coast of Scotland is Ailsa Craig, an uninhabited 104-acre island that’s home to the only known supply of the granite needed to make a proper curling stone.
It’s called blue hone granite – an intensely hard substance that is uniquely suited to slide smooth and true down a 146-foot long sheet of ice, withstand countless crashes into other stones and prevent even trace amounts of moisture to seep into it. That would cause it to pit and thus move unpredictably.
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Curling stones are made of blue hone granite from Ailsa Craig off the Scotland coast.
(Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
“This is the best type of granite in the world for this type of purpose,” said Donald Macrae, managing director of Kays of Scotland Curling Stones, which has exclusive rights to the island’s granite.
You could say without blue hone granite there is no sport of curling. The Olympics refuse to use anything else. There’s only one problem.
“It is not going to last forever,” Macrae said.
Yes, one day Kays is going to run out of granite and curling is going to run out of stones. It’s a strange concept, like if the world just ran out of baseballs, ending – or changing – the sport forever.
There’s no need to panic or hang up the brooms; the sport isn’t going to end tomorrow, or by the next Olympics. Or even anytime soon after that.
When “one day” is, however, no one knows. It could be 20 or 30 years. It could be decades longer. It depends on demand for curling stones, British mining regulations, puffin breeding levels and if technology somehow allows for a non-blue hone granite solution.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Jutting its rounded self from the waters off the west coast of Scotland is Ailsa Craig, an uninhabited 104-acre island that’s home to the only known supply of the granite needed to make a proper curling stone.
It’s called blue hone granite – an intensely hard substance that is uniquely suited to slide smooth and true down a 146-foot long sheet of ice, withstand countless crashes into other stones and prevent even trace amounts of moisture to seep into it. That would cause it to pit and thus move unpredictably.
ADVERTISEMENT
Curling stones are made of blue hone granite from Ailsa Craig off the Scotland coast.
(Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
“This is the best type of granite in the world for this type of purpose,” said Donald Macrae, managing director of Kays of Scotland Curling Stones, which has exclusive rights to the island’s granite.
You could say without blue hone granite there is no sport of curling. The Olympics refuse to use anything else. There’s only one problem.
“It is not going to last forever,” Macrae said.
Yes, one day Kays is going to run out of granite and curling is going to run out of stones. It’s a strange concept, like if the world just ran out of baseballs, ending – or changing – the sport forever.
There’s no need to panic or hang up the brooms; the sport isn’t going to end tomorrow, or by the next Olympics. Or even anytime soon after that.
When “one day” is, however, no one knows. It could be 20 or 30 years. It could be decades longer. It depends on demand for curling stones, British mining regulations, puffin breeding levels and if technology somehow allows for a non-blue hone granite solution.
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