Of course I was happy to see curling added to the Olympic lineup in 2002. I would have to figure out when and what channel the matches were being shown since the main coverage would be focused on events that were more popular in the US most notably those where a person gets a score based on a perception of a performance. Even though the US won bronze in 2006, there was not much coverage and often that coverage would be preempted to show other events.
In 2010, the coverage increased and there was optimism since the lead from the 2006 team, John Shuster, was the skip (captain) who threw the final two rocks (shots) for the team and the coverage of the regular matches increased. What that meant was that in 2010 many saw Shuster fail multiple times on shots any Olympic curler would be expected to make and it got so bad that he was demoted then benched from a last place squad.
What I started to do (as well as the person who created the shustersucks Twitter handle) was use the word "shuster" to describe a person screwing up at the end of a sports event. Another poor performance from Shuster in 2014 with a squad that finished 9th out of 10 kept that phrase relevant. When I blew a 5 shot lead with 5 holes to do in a disc golf tournament in November 2016, I said that I did a "shuster".
During FuMPFeST 2015, Canadian guest of honor The Arrogant Worms made a reference in their song "I Ran Away" describing in technical terms how bad a person was at curling which I immediately responded, "so he is John Shuster". No one around me understood what I meant but when I later mentioned that to Mike McCormick, the band member who did the rant, he laughed.
Apparently the US Curling Federation was not happy with Shuster's Olympic performance either as they sponsored 10 other curlers to try to get a more competitive team in 2018. When I was watching Curling Night in America, I was relieved to not see him in the US lineup. However, to my disappointment I discovered that Shuster was able with a new squad win the US Olympic trial and represent the team in 2018.
For the first week, things went as expected and after two bad games over the weekend, I mentioned that a sick coworker on Monday must have watched the matches. The next day, I was surprised to hear that the US beat Canada and when I saw the difficult last shot that Shuster executed to win the match, I was shocked. The next two games, he was even better and the US qualified for the semi-finals against Canada.
Again, he played a top level match perfectly executing the type of shot to win the match that he likely would have missed in 2010 and 2014. Though Shuster missed a couple shots in the final after making a great one early, the Swedish skip missed some too including one that allowed Shuster to make a relatively easy shot to take a huge lead to win the gold medal.
I was up until almost 4AM to see everything live and 10 hours later, I am still in disbelief over what I saw.
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