CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — The world of curling has spent decades trying to figure out a way to raise its profile beyond the “once-every-four-years” curiosity it becomes during the Winter Olympics.

Turns out, all it took was a graze of a finger on a 40ish-pound piece of granite, an allegation caught on camera followed by an impassioned expletive-laden response.

Social media and the white-hot spotlight that only the Games provide did the rest.

The animated back-and-forth between Sweden's Oskar Eriksson and Canada’s Marc Kennedy during a match Saturday night — when Eriksson accused Kennedy of an illegal “double touch” — managed to do in a handful of seconds what years of promotion by those within the sport that looks like a combination of shuffleboard, chess and vacuuming the living room could not: cut through the noise to push it to the front of the line, ahead of the skiers and skaters and snowboarders that typically dominate the conversation whenever the Games roll around.

Alina Paetz watched the proof unfold in real time. The longtime Swiss curler was scrolling on her phone over the weekend when she ran across a headline about it from celebrity-focused “People" magazine, not exactly considered a go-to for all things curling.

“That's pretty new,” Paetz said.

A lot of this kind of is.

There is no such thing as bad publicity

Here is the delicate part for those within a sport that dates back centuries and is steadily cultivating a larger fanbase. Does it matter that the gateway for many into curling is two guys snapping at each other and not an exquisite takeout or a dramatic hammer that decides a match?

“I think that for curling, to grow the sport, publicity is good,” said Canadian Emma Miskew, a three-time world champion whose own skip — Rachel Homan — was accused of the same “double touch” violation as Kennedy. “But in this situation, it just was a little blown up. It was a little too far.”

On that, Mishew is right. The conversation grew so intense online that Nolan Thiessen, CEO of Curling Canada, told The Associated Press there have been “disgusting” emails directed toward family members of the Canadian team.

“That’s where it’s going to stop, right? We keep it on the ice,” Thiessen said. “If you want to hate our teams, that’s your right as a sports fan.”

Thiessen, however, also recognizes the opportunity all this has provided. The pushback by self-appointed curling experts — many of whom likely didn't know the hog line even existed until a few days ago — is tough to stomach. At the same time, curling has never been such a prominent part of the Olympic conversation.

“It's both sides of it, right?” he said. “You get the people reaching out that are really upset about the rules infraction. And then you get the people that are reaching out about the drama between the two teams.”

That second part is not nothing. There are many paths to fandom. Almost all of them have the same starting point: exposure. This time, the exposure seems to be wrapped up in what could best be described as Olympic catnip.

The fact that the teams at the Cortina Curling Center compete under the flag of the country they represent means there are built-in allegiances. Throw in a sport whose nuances are largely a mystery, mic up the athletes to provide an intimate glimpse, put national pride on the line in the form of Olympic medals and you've got all the ingredients necessary to get a foot in the door.

“I think that there’s value in creating people watching curling, people getting interested in curling,” said Kristian Heldin Lindstrom, manager of Sweden's women's Olympic team. “And if you start watching it, maybe you’re going to keep watching it because it is a very interesting sport, there is a lot of complexity to it.”

Eyeing the future

Nic Sulsky is kind of banking on it. The CEO of The Curling Group acquired the rights to the Grand Slam of Curling in 2024 in hopes of creating a sustainable professional league.

The organization pointed to the spring of 2026 as a potential launch date from the second it took over the Grand Slam. The Rock League will kick off with a one-week event in Toronto in April, when six teams of 10 curlers (five men and five women) will face off.

The calculus was easy. Sulsky, a Montreal native whose background is in gambling ventures, knew there would be a spike in interest in curling once the Olympics began, just like there always is.

The sport's ubiquity during the Games — the competition actually began two days before the opening ceremony and will wrap up with the women's gold-medal match just hours before the closing ceremony starts — combined with its relatability as one of the few Winter Olympic disciplines where danger isn't imminent, makes it a fun hang.

Sulsky felt April would be a chance to strike while the rock is hot. He just didn't envision it being quite this hot or being talked about in quite this way.

“Would we have all preferred if the world fell in love with curling because of an incredible curling shot? Sure," Sulsky told The AP. “But what do fans love more than anything else? They love personality, they love stars.”

And there was a realness in the exchange between Ericksson and Kennedy that wouldn't have been out of place on a soccer pitch or a hockey rink.

“All this has done is just shine a light on how competitive, how emotional and how interesting these athletes are,” he said.

The reality is, Ericksson and Kennedy's spat isn't that uncommon, particularly when it comes to double-touching.

The rule that bars those curling the stone from touching it with their fingers once they release it can be difficult to police. There's typically an honors system involved. There is no official video replay available to sort it out, leaving it up to the officials or the competitors themselves. It can lead to messily authentic moments like the one that went viral on Saturday night.

Given the massive stir it has created, maybe Kennedy and Ericksson were on to something.

Asked if this means curling could one day borrow a page from professional wrestling and give competitors microphones where they can cut promos before and after matches to create storylines in hopes of keeping a foothold in the public consciousness, Paetz laughed.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Who knows how it looks in five years? I think maybe it just stays the way it is right now."

And that might be more than enough.

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Associated Press writer Julia Frankel contributed to this report.

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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Mikaela Shiffrin stood at the start gate atop the giant slalom course at sun-splashed Tofane and made a promise to herself.

“I’m going to do this whole thing here,” she said.

Considering the path the American star has taken to reach the Milan Cortina Olympics, and to this event in particular, that was enough.

So while the leaderboard near the finish line during Sunday's GS needed to flip to the second page before Shiffrin's name appeared in 11th, the most decorated skier in the history of the sport didn't view her finish as a disappointment.

Disappointment is washing out, which she did four years ago in Beijing. Disappointment is wondering if the speed that once came so easily would ever return while recovering from a harrowing crash during a World Cup start in Killington, Vermont, in late 2024 that left her abdomen punctured and her confidence shaken.

What happened during what Shiffrin called “the greatest show of GS skiing we've had in a really long time” was not disappointment. If anything, it was the opposite.

Yes, Shiffrin finished outside the top 10. The way the snow felt underneath her skis and the razor-thin margin that separated the silver medalists from the chasing pack — there was no catching Italy's Federica Brignone on this day — offered evidence she's trending in the right direction heading into slalom, her best event, on Wednesday.

“To be here now like within touch of the fastest women, that’s huge for me,” Shiffrin said. “So I’m proud of that.”

The gap between Shiffrin and co-runners-up Sara Hector of Sweden and Thea Louise Stjernesund was an impossibly tight 0.3 seconds in a discipline that requires skiers to make two runs.

When Shiffrin won gold in the GS in Pyeongchang eight years ago, the gap between silver and 11th was around 1.4 seconds. Four years ago in Beijing, it was nearly 2 seconds. Three weeks ago at a World Cup event in Czechia, where Shiffrin earned her first podium in the GS in two years, it was over 3 1/2 seconds.

On Sunday, Shiffrin was right there. A turn here. A turn there. On a course that was a little flatter and a little less technically demanding that what Shiffrin and the rest of the best skiers in the world usually see — one almost explicitly designed to create a safe and ultracompetitive race — the difference between a medal and the middle was nearly imperceptible.

Shiffrin promised to “learn” after slogging down through the slalom in the women's combined last week, when her skis couldn't seem to “go.” Perhaps too aware of the perception of an Olympic slump — the Games are the only place she hasn't won in the last eight years — she did her best to refocus and block out the noise.

In her mind, she did just that. She could feel herself taking power from the course. As “Killing In The Name Of” by Rage Against the Machine blasted over the speakers during her second run, Shiffrin felt like she was in the moment and not in her head.

“It felt good to push, which was amazing,” she said, later adding: “It felt really good to ski high intensity.”

Shiffrin's intensity feels as if it is slowly but steadily ramping up. She wore bib No. 3, a nod to the fact she's back in the top 7 in the world in the GS, something she considered a “challenging task” when the season began. It's become doable, but Shiffrin has learned progress isn't linear.

While she continues to dominate slalom — in which she's already clinched her ninth World Cup series title with two races to go — GS is another matter. Sure, Shiffrin's 22 career GS victories are a record. But she hasn't won a GS race since late 2023.

Her climb back up the GS rankings has been fueled by consistency. The “lights-out speed” she knows is required to finish atop the podium doesn't come quite as easily as it did when she was at the peak of her powers. That's fine.

“The task ahead of me for the coming months (and) in the coming years is to try to bring that kind of intensity and fire and to continue to work with the team to find those hundredths (of a second) that it takes to actually win races,” she said.

That didn't happen under the snowcapped peaks of the Dolomites on Sunday. Maybe on another course, one with a more difficult setup that would allow her to lean in to her experience, things may have played out differently.

It's not a conversation Shiffrin seems particularly interested in having. The layout allowed for competitive racing. And she pointed to the medal stand — where the 35-year-old Brignone won her second gold in four days and Hector added silver to go with the gold she captured in Beijing in 2022 — as proof the results were not fluky.

“It wasn’t like somebody won who wasn’t supposed to win,” Shiffrin said.

Brignone emerged as a deserving champion. Behind her, however, was chaos. Shiffrin doesn't think that's a bad thing.

“(We were all) close and that’s how that’s how high the competition level, is I think,” she said. “That’s a beautiful show of our sport on an Olympic stage.”

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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Soaring arias. Wrenching tragedy. Joyful triumphs. Exotic backdrops. Climaxes often designed to produce tears, sad or otherwise.

Perhaps more than anything, the operas that Italians began creating 400 years ago are designed to make you feel. To have the rest of the world melt away as you get lost in a story sung in a language you might not understand, but whose stakes are unmistakable.

No wonder the country that invented the art form where music and poetry merge, and these Winter Olympics seem to be such a perfect fit.

The quadrennial spectacle that began its stay in Northern Italy with a gala hosted by the International Olympic Committee at the iconic La Scala opera house in Milan spent its first full week reflecting the host country's signature art form onto itself.

The magic the Games so often provide, no matter where they may go, seemingly a little bolder, a little louder, a little more deeply felt.

Tearful exits

The initial gasp that gave way to eerie silence after American skiing star Lindsey Vonn's right arm clipped a gate just 13 seconds into the women's downhill on Sunday, leading to a spectacular and brutal crash that broke her left leg and ended her unlikely Olympic return at 41.

Crashes happen. It's a part of the sport. The “only at the Games” flourish came afterward, when Vonn's long, slow helicopter ride down the mountain to safety veered gently to the left, flying over the grandstand where the throngs who came out to watch her bid for history waved a tearful goodbye instead.

The tears for Vonn were borne out of concern and what might have been. The tears from IOC president Kirsty Coventry after telling Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych he was disqualified for refusing to replace a helmet adorned with images of over 20 coaches and athletes who have died since Russia's invasion began were of anguish and regret.

“No one, no one — especially me — is disagreeing with the messaging,” Coventry said. “The messaging is a powerful message.”

One so compelling and so important to Heraskevych that the 27-year-old sacrificed his dreams of Olympic glory to make it. Even if the attention he received for his stand caught him off guard.

"I never expected it to be such a big scandal,” he said on Friday after an appeal hearing.

Four years into a war that drags on with an end still not quite in sight, Heraskevych's stand dragged a conflict that in some areas of the world has retreated to the shadows and thrust it back into the international spotlight unique to the Games. His selfless decision elevated the discussion about his homeland to the public writ large in a way that no gold-medal-winning run ever could.

Heraskevych's act was intended for a global audience. Norway's Sturla Holm Laegreid was speaking to an audience of one after earning bronze in the men’s 20-kilometer race. His startling confession of infidelity to a former partner after what was supposed to serve as one of the highlights of his career upstaging the gold won in the same race by countryman Johan-Olav Botn.

Love both lost and won

Being lovesick in Italy is hardly new. There's a reason seemingly every high school literature class makes “Romeo and Juliet" required reading. The Shakespearean tragedy is set in Verona, about 3 hours southwest of where Laegreid made his stunning plea, sounding very much like a teenager in the throes of heartache. His vow of contrition created a viral moment that passes for social currency, the fallout be damned.

“I can understand what he wants to have happen with his girlfriend," retired German athlete Erik Lesser told The Associated Press. "But I just want to think about sport, want to see sport, want to talk about sport.”

Yet the Olympics have never really been just about sport. How can they be when the lines between sports, politics and culture seem to be growing more blurry by the day? The only thing perfect about the Games may be the five intertwined rings that have long served as its logo.

That's what makes it so enthralling. A few days after Laegreid achieved a small piece of infamy, Olympic downhill champion Breezy Johnson retreated into the arms of boyfriend Connor Watkins after crashing in the Super-G.

While Johnson's dreams of leaving Cortina with multiple golds were gone, another was realized anyway when Watkins dropped to a knee and recited Taylor Swift lyrics while producing a blue and white sapphire ring.

Johnson giddily accepted before jumping into his arms, the physical pain and emotional disappointment of what happened up on the mountain only minutes earlier replaced by a memory and a promise that will stick with her forever.

"I think most people want to peak at the Olympics,” Johnson said. “I just extra peaked.”

Favorites upstaged

Not everyone does at a festival where unpredictability often outduels inevitability for top billing.

For every breakthrough like the one American figure skater Ilia Malinin is providing one electrifying backflip and quadruple jump at a time, there are bold-faced champions somewhat surprisingly ceding the stage they've so often commanded.

Mikaela Shiffrin arrived in Cortina as the winningest ski racer in the history of the sport. Eager to put an 0 for 6 run four years ago in Beijing behind her, she instead began her fourth Olympics with her worst showing in a slalom that she started and finished since 2012, costing Shiffrin and Johnson a gold in women's combined and opening the door for teammates Jackie Wiles and Paula Moltzan to claim the first Olympic medals of their long careers.

American snowboarding icon Chloe Kim's bid for an unprecedented third gold in the halfpipe ended late Thursday when a teenager who grew up idolizing her — Gaon Choi of South Korea — pulled off an upset in snowy Livigno.

"I’m a winner because I was able to persevere and fight through,” said Kim, who competed just a month removed from a dislocated shoulder.

And perhaps more than anything at the Olympics, it's the fight that matters.

For the thousands of athletes scattered across northern Italy, the road to this moment in their lives is rooted in a passion found long ago. The flames may have flickered for many along the way. How could they not? The drudgery of practice. The financial burden. The inevitable physical toll. The hidden mental strain has only recently graduated from hushed whispers to a full-fledged conversation.

It's a lot to carry. No wonder it's such fertile ground for drama.

Italy's moment

And no one has leaned into it more than the hosts who have surged to the top of the medal table.

Yet a country known for big gestures and even bigger emotions is also one that can revel in the quiet and before the catharsis.

Ten months ago, Italian skier Federica Brignone shredded her left leg in a crash that required multiple surgeries, a handful of screws to keep things in place and months of rehab. The 35-year-old never stopped pointing toward Cortina. On Thursday, in front of a crowd that included Italian President Sergio Mattarella, Brignone ignored the lingering pain to throw down a sublime Super-G run in tricky conditions to earn her first Olympic gold.

After the medal ceremony, the Italian Air Force’s acrobatic unit thundered overhead, leaving a trail of the country's familiar combination of green, white and red in its wake.

The slopes in Cortina shook. The flags waved. Brignone wept, thinking not so much of glory, but the winding path she took to get here.

"One of those films that you don’t believe in because it’s not possible for it to end that well,” Brignone said.

Maybe that's the best part.

It's not the end. We're only halfway there. Who knows?

Milan Cortina's second act could be even better than the first.

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AP Sports Writers Andrew Dampf, Graham Dunbar, Dave Skretta, Tim Reynolds and AP National Writer Eddie Pells contributed to this report.

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AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics