In the sport of curling, the skip is the captain of a team. The skip determines strategy, and holds the broom in the house to indicate where a teammate at the other end of the curling sheet should aim the stone. The skip usually throws the last two stones in the fourth position, but may play in any other position.
Skips Madeleine Dupont, Andrea Schöpp, and Mirjam Ott hold their brooms on the ice at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Curling is a sport in which players slide stones on a sheet of ice toward a target area which is segmented into four concentric circles. It is related to bowls, boules, and shuffleboard. Two teams, each with four players, take turns sliding heavy, polished granite stones, also called rocks, across the ice curling sheet toward the house, a circular target marked on the ice. Each team has eight stones, with each player throwing two. The purpose is to accumulate the highest score for a game; points are scored for the stones resting closest to the centre of the house at the conclusion of each end, which is completed when both teams have thrown all of their stones once. A game usually consists of eight or ten ends.
Curling games taking place during the 2005 Tim Hortons Brier
Detail from a reproduction of Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (Bruegel, 1565)
A curling match at Eglinton Castle, Ayrshire, Scotland in 1860. The curling house is located to the left of the picture.
Group of people curling on a lake in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, c. 1897