… Beaten 6-8 by Germany in opening game

GUYANA, through Rayad and Farzana Hussain, made its debut at the 2018 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship in Östersund, Sweden yesterday.
In their Group E opening match, the Guyanese pair went down 6-8 to the Germans but will be looking to bounce back when they face Korea today.

Of the 40 nations competing in Sweden, Guyana is the only country from the Caribbean being represented at the April 21-28 games, doing so just one year after the sport was rolled out locally, with a demonstration at the Giftland Mall.
Curling is a team sport played by two teams of four players on a rectangular sheet of ice. Its nickname, “The Roaring Game”, originates from the rumbling sound the 44-pound (19.96kg) granite stones make when they travel across the ice.

One of the world’s oldest team sports, curling originated in the 16th century in Scotland, where games were played during winter on frozen ponds and lochs. The earliest-known curling stones came from the Scottish regions of Stirling and Perth and date back from 1511.

Mixed doubles is a dynamic form of curling, where it is all about stone positioning, and a lot of play to the four-foot circle and a lot about angles. It is a faster version of curling that only requires two players on each team.
Mixed Doubles Curling made its debut on the Olympic Winter Programme at the games in Pyeongchang, South Korea earlier this year.

Mixed Doubles is played by two players; one male and one female on each team. Both teams play five stones each and start every end with one stone that has been pre-placed, so the maximum amount of points in each end is six.
In most ends, the pre-placed stones will be positioned so that the team with last-stone advantage (hammer) will start the end with one stone at the back of the four foot circle. The team without the last-stone advantage will start with a centre guard.

Founded in 2016, the Guyana Curling Federation was established to not only govern and promote the Winter Olympic Sport of Curling to Guyanese both within Guyana and abroad, but also to raise the profile of Winter Sport within the Caribbean region by working with other similar bodies and organisations.