A curling fight at the 2026 Olympics.

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Olympics Jerk Watch is a long-running feature that subjectively rates the jerkiness (or lack thereof) of the Games’ biggest stars. Read more of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage here.

Curling, it’s fair to say, is one of the less aggro sports at the Winter Olympics. While other winter disciplines involve hurtling down mountains at great speeds or flying through the air while wearing ice skates, it’s possible to compete in curling as a 54-year-old lawyer who wears a baseball cap during competition. Sure, curlers get amped up, in their way. It’s just that curling isn’t the sort of sport that typically involves arguing, accusations of cheating, or telling your opponents to “fuck off.”

Well! We live in argumentative times, and I suppose it was naïve to think that curling would be immune to the coarsening factors that have spoiled literally every good thing we’ve got. For the last few days, the Olympics have been roiled by a dispute that broke out during a men’s round-robin match between Canada and Sweden. In brief, Swedish curler Oskar Eriksson accused Canada’s Marc Kennedy of cheating by “double-touching” a curling rock as it passed over the “hog line.” Kennedy preceded to tell Eriksson exactly where he could stick his claims. Since then, the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium has been a hotbed of hurt feelings, raised voices, and Palantir-esque hog line surveillance.

There is a lot to unpack here, such as what on earth a hog line is, and why they call it that. But the main question is this: In the initial dispute between Canada and Sweden, who was being the biggest jerk?

As the world’s foremost expert on Olympic jerkdom, I am ready, willing, and able to adjudicate this dispute. Olympic Jerk Court is in session, Judge Peters presiding. Bangs gavel on laptop. Damages laptop. Resolves to bill Slate for repairs to laptop.

The facts of the case: On Friday, Team Canada faced off against Team Sweden in what was expected to be a friendly meeting between two of the more experienced men’s squads on the curling circuit. But tensions flared when, at the close of the second end, Sweden’s Eriksson notified the officials of his belief that the Canadians had been double-touching stones as they crossed the hog line.

The hog line sits 10 meters in front of the spot on the ice where a curler begins his delivery. A curler must fully release his stone before it reaches the hog line, and cannot touch it again once it passes said line. (Why do they call it the hog line? According to the website of Curling Canada, the term has something to do with Scottish agriculture. Duh!) If a stone does get touched past the hog line, the opposing team has the option to remove that stone from the ice, according to Section R9(b) of World Curling’s Olympic rulebook.

Now, curling is a sport that can seem like it’s straight out of the 1600s, given its heavy reliance on brooms. (This is exactly the kind of nonsense that got people accused of witchcraft in Salem.) But the sport isn’t entirely low-tech. There are sensors inside each stone’s handle that lights up if the handle gets touched after the stone crosses the hog line. But according to Eriksson and his increasingly aggrieved teammates, Canada’s Kennedy was circumventing this alarm by double-touching the base of the stone.

Is Kennedy a double-toucher? Plenty of online pundits are sure that he is, and after reviewing the footage I’ll admit that it’s more likely than not. To my mind, though the evidence is not 100 percent definitive. In this slow-motion video—which I will refer to as Exhibit A—Kennedy brings his index finger very close to the base of the stone as it begins to cross the hog line. But the camera angle makes it hard to know with certainty if he touched the stone, or if he was just trailing it with his finger, perhaps as a tic of his delivery, or simply to wish it bon voyage as it journeyed down the ice.

Are there strategic reasons for a curler to double-touch the base of a stone immediately after delivering it down the ice? Some have speculated that a double-touch might help add a little bit of distance or subtly alter the trajectory of what he suspects might be a weak or misaligned delivery. While I suppose that’s possible, I am skeptical that a feathery hog-line tap of the sort allegedly seen in Exhibit A would meaningfully affect the momentum and direction of a curling stone.

Because curling isn’t the NFL, there aren’t two dozen camera angles to choose from for replay purposes, and there aren’t a bunch of referees on the lookout for potential infractions. (There are judges who sit at a table well above the ice. Us judges love to sit at tables.) Curling, like pickup basketball, is a largely self-refereed sport. And pickup basketball games never devolve into futile arguments!

Tensions, accusations, and alleged double-touching continued throughout the match, which Team Canada won by a score of 8-6. Everything boiled over after the ninth end, when Eriksson finally confronted Kennedy. It began with the Swede passive-aggressively observing that “apparently it’s OK touching the rock after the hog line, I don’t know.”

“Who’s doing it?” Kennedy replied, and after some back-and-forth, Eriksson pointed accusatorily in Kennedy’s direction. I will quote the rest of their exchange in full (and will heretofore refer to this transcript as Exhibit B):

Kennedy: I haven’t done it once. You can fuck off.

Eriksson: You haven’t done it once?

Kennedy: I haven’t done it once. Don’t chirp!

Eriksson: OK. I’ll show you video after the game.

Kennedy: How about you walking around on my peel in the last end and dancing around the house here? How about that? Come on, Oskar. Just fuck off.

Eriksson: Want me to show you a video?

Kennedy: I don’t give a shit.

The chirping continued after the match. In a press conference, Kennedy vociferously rejected Eriksson’s allegations. “There’s hog line devices on there. I don’t know. And he’s still accusing us of cheating. I didn’t like it. So I told him where to stick it,” said the Canadian, who went on to speculate that Eriksson “might have been upset that he was losing.” In his own press conference, Eriksson blamed the judges, who he said had failed to accurately interpret and enforce the rules of curling. (Us judges are always getting blamed for things, but I suppose it just goes with the territory.)

Jerk factors: For the moment, let’s set aside the question of whether Kennedy double-touched. Instead, consider this question: What should he have done when he became aware that Sweden believed he was double-touching?

According to the “Spirit of Curling” section of the World Curling Olympic rulebook, curlers “would prefer to lose rather than to win unfairly. Curlers never knowingly break a rule of the game, nor disrespect any of its traditions. Should they become aware that this has been done inadvertently, they will be the first to divulge the breach.”

Doesn’t it therefore follow that the Spirit of Curling should have compelled Kennedy to alter his delivery upon realizing that Team Sweden took issue with it? The fact that he didn’t—and the fact that he took such umbrage to the Swedish curlers’ complaints—seems sort of jerky.

However! The “Spirit of Curling” section also notes that “Curlers play to win, but never to humble their opponents. A true curler never attempts to distract opponents, nor to prevent them from playing their best.” By running to the judges and complaining about Kennedy’s delivery—which, even if it was illegal, was hardly a felony infraction—was Team Sweden perhaps attempting to distract and humble Team Canada? Might it not have been more sporting just to play on?

It’s important to understand the context in which Team Sweden chose to lodge its complaints. These guys have competed against each other for years, and it seems unlikely that Friday was the very first time that the Swedes noticed this quirk in Kennedy’s delivery. Speaking to the Globe and Mail, Kennedy wondered why the Swedish curlers hadn’t broached their suspicions in an off-ice conversation before the match began. “They have come up with a plan here at the Olympics, as far as I know, to catch teams in the act at the hog line and it was planned, right from the word go,” Kennedy insisted.

Also, remember in Exhibit B, when Eriksson said he would show Kennedy video after the game of his infractions? Well, there was indeed video of Kennedy’s hog-line delivery—but it didn’t come from Olympic Broadcasting Services, the official videographers of the Milan Cortina Games. Instead, it was apparently filmed by Swedish media members, and while Team Sweden denies that they coordinated with the media to film Kennedy’s delivery, Team Canada isn’t buying it. “They actually had videos for the Italian team as well. So they’ve got people up there videoing, and that whole thing was premeditated and planned,” coach Paul Webster told the Globe and Mail.

It’s plausible that the Swedes were aware that Kennedy was prone to extending his index finger as the stone crossed the hog line, and chose to wait until the Olympics to document and publicize the issue, in the manner of the reality television show Cheaters. If true, this choice would seem to violate the Spirit of Curling, no? On the other hand, it isn’t inherently jerky to want to play by the rules, and to want your opponents to do the same. While it is irritating to compete against someone who is always complaining to the officials, that doesn’t mean the complainant is a jerk.

It is sort of jerky, though, to react to an accusation of double-touching by telling the officials that, actually, the Swedes were the ones who were double-touching, as Canada’s Ben Hebert did. “I’m not cheating, you’re cheating” is a lame enough excuse when used on an elementary school playground, let alone at the Olympic Games.

Now, back to Exhibit B. The argument between Eriksson and Kennedy struck me as the curling equivalent of Michael Barrett punching A.J. Pierzynski in the face after Pierzynski ran over Barrett at home plate. In this admittedly niche and dated analogy, I suppose that would make Marc Kennedy A.J. Pierzynski. Michael Barrett also sucked, to be clear, as evidenced by the fact that Carlos “Big Z” Zambrano once punched him in the face, but Pierzynski was way worse. Way to remind me of one of the most irritating baseball players of all time, you jerk!

Now that that’s out of my system, I’ll note that, according to Section R19 of World Curling’s Olympic rulebook, “foul or offensive language … on the part of any team member is prohibited” during a curling match. Kennedy clearly violated this rule. That’s a jerk point for him!

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Sweden-Canada contretemps has had broader ramifications. Now, all of the Olympic curling teams are paying close attention to double-touching over the hog line—and, as it turns out, Kennedy isn’t the only curler in Cortina who allegedly does it. If double-touching is rather common in curling, then in this judge’s opinion it is jerky to turn the Winter Olympics into a referendum on the practice. It reflects poorly on the sport, in the quadrennial moment when regular people are paying attention to curling. Sweden’s choice to surface this complaint at the most visible moment possible arguably imperils World Curling’s ability to pursue its mission statement: “To be the world’s favourite Olympic / Paralympic Winter team sport.” Good luck supplanting hockey now!

He’s Shy. He’s Awkward. He’s an Olympic Figure Skating Champion.

Jerk verdict: While the Swedish curlers acted jerkily in pressing a nitpicking complaint in a way that created bad feelings and has subsequently overshadowed the entire Olympic curling competition, the Canadians were slightly more jerky here, both by arguably violating a basic rule of the sport and by bringing profanity into a milieu where it does not belong: the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium. Exempted from this judgment is Canadian curler Brett Gallant, who, true to his surname, was not heard cursing on the ice or whining about how the Swedes double-touched first. The rest of these Canadian goofuses are sentenced to serve two ends in Jerk Jail, but I will suspend the sentence on the grounds that Double-Touch Gate has prompted the creation of some excellent memes. My verdict is final and no appeals will be heard. Next!

Previously on Olympics Jerk Watch:
The Snowboarder Who Puts the “Extreme” in “Extremely Wanted Fugitive”
The Dutch Speedskater Who’s Engaged to One of the Most Irritating Men on Earth