Here's a sport we can excel at

OPINION: Counting against the Wintry Olympics is that they are invariably cold.

Not so for us back here, where the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be remembered for Sky's five-channel coverage of curling and exhilarating new sports such as ski cross and snowboard cross.

Own up those who have watched more curling than skiing.

Curling is the answer to the decline of bowls in New Zealand. Curling is bowls on ice, so let's rip up the cotula, put down ice and bingo, we have an instant Olympic sport.

If we rely on frozen tarns in Central Otago to provide our curling teams, it won't work, not with global warming and all.

A New Zealand team qualified for the 2006 Turin Olympics, but didn't win a game, despite some matches going to the last stone, and thus is not at Vancouver.

New Zealand has five indoor curling rinks, but the one in Avondale in Auckland is the only one in the North Island.

But nationwide, there are about 40 clubs, according to the New Zealand Curling Association, with colourful names like Windwhistle, Chatto Creek, Garibaldi, Upper Man and Rough Ridge.

The sport is tailormade for television. It was thrilling to watch the skips gracefully sliding the rocks down the rink and the sweepers acting like Antarctic icebreakers.

If China, yes China, can knock over the Canadians, then we can do it. Curling has a similar strategy to bowls, except that the stones slide straighter.

By the way, women curlies recently bared all in a 36-month calendar to fund their way in the sport.

Maybe bowls could try that too, but don't tell Tiger!

The time to fear terrorist attacks on sports teams is either when there is no warning given or Americans are competing.

The stroppy al-Qaeda guy, the one-eyed Ilyas Kashmiri of 313 Brigade who made the threat against India, has put the fear of death into everyone with a few words.

Surely now the turbaned Indian security wallahs will be on heightened alert for the hockey and the Commonwealth Games, and it will be safer than if Ilyas had said nothing. The world can't bow to every terrorist threat or it will cease to function.

It is hopeless when individuals, like hockey player Simon Child, pull out and leave their team-mates to travel and face the music.

Rightly or wrongly, it looks wimpish and he should have weighed up the following odds.

The likelihood of being attacked in India is way below that of being run over by boy racers at home, hit by a tourist driving on the wrong side of the road, knocked off your bike by a car or attacked after dark by thugs. That's all in New Zealand by the way. Delhi belly is a far greater danger in India.

There is even a travel advisory against going to Fiji, and our time in Suva at the sevens couldn't have been more peaceful.

While on security concerns, spare a thought for Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer who copped protesters' invective in Auckland in January. In Dubai this week, she was largely confined to her hotel room and allowed to leave only for her matches. There she had 25 bodyguards and was forced to play on a secluded court.

We can but wonder whether the Manawatu cricket team's two big Hawke Cup wins are the portent of bigger things ahead.

Some of the young Manawatu players will soon press for places in the Central Districts team. In the case of opening bowlers Bevan Small and Adam Milne, CD must recognise they are teenagers and probably still growing.

Palmerston North Boys' High First XI coach Paul Gibbs was always wary of evolutionary overload and never flogged the boys at school. Manawatu produces more talented cricketers than every district within CD combined, and Boys' High must take much of the credit.

Don't forget this summer our team hasn't had to call on useful players such as Taylor, Oram and Mason.

- © Fairfax NZ News