Basel - Edition 3b

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I will begin........

Today was the first day of the WCF Open Meetings held here in Basel - the last time that there will be such meetings at this time of year as the new system will have them at the Annual Congress to be held in October each year. There will still be the opportunity for Member Associations (MA) to call a Semi-Annual meeting if they feel it is necessary but the norm would be just the one set of meetings each year.

Today's meeting started off fairly easily with a short presentation on rules and competitions from Keith Wendorf:

There will be no rule changes before the Sochi Olympics in 2014 but a draft questionnaire has been developed for players and others to comment on a number of issues for consideration after that. The questionnaire has been piloted with the players and will be mounted on the WCF website for responses to be made between May and September. The main topics are: length of the game; timing of the game; playoff system; free guard zone; tie break games, and time-outs.

There was a discussion about the need for official accreditation to be available for an eighth person at major Championships - currently 7 are provided for the 5 players, the team coach and another team official. Basically the eighth person would normally be a medical or fitness person but it would all depend on the facilities available at venues. 

And the final point on the competition side was that, as confirmed in Moscow, the current system of qualification for World Championships would remain but that the WCF would seek to control their own qualification events, e.g the European Championships - and this would have further implications for the European Curling Federation. The working groupon World Qualification had now been disbanded.

The next item was a report back from the Mixed Doubles Working Group. Having decided in Champery in 2010 not to apply for official inclusion of MD at the Olympics, this group had been set up to see how the discipline could be taken forward.

Colin Grahamslaw of the WCF had led the commission with other members being Greg Stremlaw (Canada), Georgy Nagy (Hungary), Edith Loudon (Scotland) and Peter Becker (New Zealand).

They had initially considered other alternatives to an additional discipline for the Olympics - e.g mixed, singles / hot shots, skins but confirmed that MD seemed to be the best one to promote. It would provide an extra medal, would be gender balanced, would require few additional athletes, no extra facilities and would enable 16 nations to compete and remain in the same time frame - an important factor for the Olympic Games.

A questionnaire to all MAs had brought 25 responses, 21 of them hosted or planned to host Championships which ranged in entry numbers from 2 to 35 pairs (Italy)!!

The players who were interviewed loved it (though they tended to be those already playing it!!) with a few points about rules concerning the umpires placing the stones at the start of the end (why not let the players do it), stones thrown out of order (not clear what the options were), and the use of the stabiliser (which if used for delivery tended to chucked aside at the end of the slide to pick up a brush and then left for the other team to pick up!!. Time clocks were seen as vital. 

There was a positive feedback from the press interviewed but they needed to be told more about the intricacies of the game and some well known faces were needed to be seen participating.

So the first action was to try and get more nations to hold Championships and send teams to World Championships to get over the requirement that over 50% of the MAs had to hold Championships to help Olympic approval. The idea was mooted about giving a grant to teams participating in World Championships, either specifically for travel or for accommodation or just a general grant for each MA to use as they saw fit.

Secondly an education pack was being put together for the media and it was also decided that live webstreaming is a must – this will happen from Erzurum in April and in 2013 there will be TV broadcasting from theWMDCC.(Venue will be announced on Friday).

On reflection I have decided that my report on the rest of the meeting, which discussed the work of the Governance Commission will have to wait until tomorrow as otherwise it will make War and Peace look like a paperback novelet.

So good night from Basel for this evening.