With fewer than 400 licensees in France, curling remains an ultra-confidential sport. In Lorraine, only one club offers this discipline: Graoully Metz Curling. It was founded a few months ago by a group of friends who dream of participating in the Olympic Games in the French Alps in 2030.
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Get out your brooms, curling is coming to Lorraine! The first club to offer this discipline on ice was created in Metz at the beginning of 2024. Graoully Metz Curling was founded by a group of friends, who knew nothing about the discipline, but who started in a slightly crazy challenge: participating in the Winter Olympic Games in the French Alps in 2030.
“It all started from a joke between friends. We were wondering how to participate in the festive evenings of an Olympic village and we quickly came to the conclusion that we had to participate in these Games as athletes, says Jean-François Daret, the president of the club. We looked for the Olympic disciplines least practiced in France and we came across curling!”
With less than 400 registered licensees, curling remains an ultra-confidential sport in France and the Blues have never really shone with brooms in hand. Their one and only Olympic medal dates from a century ago (bronze in 1924).
But in 2030, as the organizing country of the Winter Games in the Alps, France could have a directly qualified team. The objective of Messins is therefore to work, to progress to possibly integrate the French selection.
Every Sunday morning, at 8 a.m., around twenty Moselle curlers meet at the Ice Arena in Metz to train. Before founding their club a few months ago, they created a sports section within the local skating club. They had to learn everything about discipline.
“We started from scratch. At first, we didn’t have any equipment, then we managed to find a set of curling stones and it all started, remembers Jean-François Daret. We looked for tutorials on the internet to discover the rules and techniques.
Curling is a sport of precision but it is also very technical. Before playing you must prepare the ice cream, sprinkling it with fine droplets of water. “Once frozen, they form a small layer on the track. This reduces the friction surface of the 20 kg granite stones, which the players must slide to the center of the target”explains Jean Lily, the Ice Man of the team.
“The most difficult thing is to master your throw, to know how to judge the distance, explains Germain Capdevila, the coach of Graoully Metz Curling. The other difficulty: it’s sweeping because, while moving forward on the ice, you have to put a lot of weight on the brooms to slow down and direct the stone.
It’s not an old man’s sport at all!
Mounia, Graoully Metz Curling player
Since its launch, the club has attracted new recruits. Like Mounia, who totally got into the game. “I thought it was an old man’s sport, but it’s not at all! she assures. It’s very physical and also very strategic like billiards or pétanque, with this added dimension of sliding, which requires you to carefully observe the characteristics of the ice.”
Graoully Metz Curling participates in the French championship, which brings together around ten clubs. A championship traditionally dominated by the Megève team, whose members make up most of the French team. But the Messins are determined to train hard to shake up the hierarchy by 2030, hoping to make their original joke a reality.
