King Kaufman's Sports Daily
D.C. Olympic Committee demands its curlers be allowed to compete. Voting rights for the city too.
Read more: Sports, King Kaufman, Curling, Sports Daily, 2006 Olympics
Feb. 9, 2006 | I'm no fan of taxation without representation, and I'm a big fan of both curling and really good press releases, so the District of Columbia Olympic Committee had me at "For immediate release."
The DCOC's only team so far is a curling team. The curlers are a tongue-in-cheek athletic endeavor but a serious attempt to draw attention to the issue of Washington citizens having no voting representatives in Congress.
It's an idea born two years ago, when the U.S. men's Olympic basketball team lost to Puerto Rico. Mike Panetta, who works for a bipartisan publicity firm called Grassroots Enterprise, which has counted both MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition as clients, wondered why it was that Puerto Rico, whose residents are U.S. citizens with no voting representatives in Congress, has an Olympic team but the District doesn't.
Ditto Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Not to mention Canada.
Welcome, Canadian curling fans! That was a little joke is all that was.
"If the District is going to be lumped in with the other red-headed stepchildren of American representative democracy, we should at least be able to compete with our own Olympic teams like other territories," Panetta says in the press release, which is really good.
I get a lot of press releases, and most of them are poorly written and about uninteresting subjects, so I love a good one. I also got a good one last week from the U.S. Lawn Mower Racing Association, which had its Winternationals Super Bowl weekend. Tough to break through the noise with that one, no matter how clever the release, sent by Bruce Kaufman, the self-proclaimed "Mr. Mow It All" and no relation to me.
But I digress. I find curling has a way of leading to digressions. That's one of the things I like about it. The sport itself -- not in the Olympics, but when played in neighborhood rinks -- has a tradition of stopping in the middle of the match and retiring to the bar for beers. Also, the slow, hypnotic pace of it, like baseball, leaves plenty of time to think.
So Panetta, after much consultation with friends and colleagues over beverages favored by curlers the world over, decided to form a curling team and try to get the International Olympic Committee to recognize D.C. for the Winter Games.
Why curling?
"It's one of those sports that's immediately endearing to people," Panetta says. "The Winter Games are coming up now, so we picked a fun winter sport that a bunch of us could legitimately pass ourselves off as pseudo amateur athletes."