THE IMPORTANT THING with middle age, as you venture further into its fleeting years, is to not get stuck in your habits. Try new things and keep the brain moving at some kind of pace. 

It’s also important not to lapse into stupid dad jokes, but I would never do that. 

The Winter Olympics was a show I wouldn’t watch before, seeing it as something for countries with more of a dry cold. 

The summer games are grand. Running, jumping, fighting, dressage, things every one of us has tried. But doing a backflip with a snowboard stuck to your feet? Who among us could even afford the baggy waterproof tracksuit? 

Or skiing down a mountain on one good knee? You’d admire the bloodyminded ambition, but it’s tough to relate.    

Yet once you push through the prejudice there is a lot of stress-free entertainment to be had. Instead of a midweek diet of Premier League there was whatever was on BBC2, and not a thought about Tottenham Hotspur’s certain relegation.

After a time you grow serene in the mountainscapes and get to thinking, what could we in Ireland do by way of all this? There must be something we could throw a bit of our aptitude and sports capital grants towards in the name of medal ambition. 

I’m not going to list all of the options because our Cool Runnings is so obvious. Curling is wide open. And it’s indoor, which will be useful now that it rains ten and a half months a year here and other indoor sports such as basketball are, let’s face it, too hard. 

But curling . . . all we need to do is round up a load of the hurling and camogie players who are decent but wouldn’t be missed on the inter-county scene if they were to switch to a different game. That’s about half of all people in the one third of the country that plays hurling, so the depth chart is already well populated. 

And in quick time we’d be better again, with conveyor belts in place due to savage work at underage, curl camps taking place all over the nation during the winter holidays. 

You wouldn’t even need much free gear from Kelloggs either as it’s a cheap sport. They are selling curleys in Homebase and Woodies quite reasonably, and there are some in Dealz for around a tenner, they’ve thrown in a free bucket too for some reason. 

For the sake of growth, we’d do well to replicate the parish vs parish model that has served us well in Gaelic games. And naturally there would be a split season in this new endeavour, with young men and women spending the first six months trying bring home the Olympic gold from places like Milano and Cortina before switching their attention to the local scene, where they’d try to win their most meaningful honour: a county title with the lads they’ve curled with since they were four or five. Monday clubs in the apres-ski, celebrations so loud as to be an avalanche risk.  

Our ascent to superpower status wouldn’t be plain skating. There would be culture wars and intergenerational friction between those who want to take a deft, tactical approach to unseating the sport’s dominant forces, and the crowd who want to see players let the stone fly and curl with abandon. None of this sweepy-snappy nonsense, just drive it into the big circle and let the lads fight over it there. Fighting is allowed in this sport, right? If not it soon will be. 

Curl with abandon. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Having watched curling in two 20 minute bursts I can report that there is little to no sledging, despite the proximity of the players to each other. Clear competitive advantage to us here. 

See how fast they can sweep that floor with a stumpy lad from Boherlahan sliding next to them saying “you’ve no wrists, you couldn’t curl spuds”. The confused Korean would still be trying to make sense of his uncharacteristically loose shot when he’s told “your dad was shite too”.

If there is a five-minute melee followed by a random sending off from either side, we’d be practised in how to adapt in-game. And our appeals strategy would be way beyond these pacifists. We’d run Olympic rings around whatever their version of the CCCC happens to be, seeking out loopholes while running a media campaign to convey the message that he’s not that type of curler. 

We’d be back to full strength in time to take the big prize, defying all of those who wrote us off. Speeches aplenty about no longer being the whipping boys of cold resorts at high altitude. All-Earth champions, or at the very least a Christy Rink.  

Right . . . I’ll get my coat before the careers ice man cometh.