A Curler Chases Gold, While He Still Can

Niklas Edin is one of the most decorated curlers on the planet. At home in Karlstad, Sweden, most of his plaques and trophies simply take up space.

“Piled up with the clothes,” said Edin, who has won five world championships, including the last three.

His two Olympic medals — a bronze from 2014 and a silver from 2018 — occupy a more prominent area of real estate in a glass cabinet. Edin, 36, is proud of them, of course.

“But we’re still missing the gold,” he said in an interview in January. “So I guess it puts a lot of extra pressure on you, because you don’t get too many chances at these.”

At the Beijing Olympics, Edin is fueled by a sense of urgency, even as he knows it will not be easy to lead his four-man team to the top of the podium. Curling, the ice sport played with brooms and large granite stones, has grown in popularity since the 2018 Games, when Sweden lost to the United States in the gold medal final in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Yet beyond facing an improved field, Edin understands the hard truth of his circumstances — that his limbs seem held together by chicken wire and masking tape. Since he was a teenager, he has had 10 operations: four on his lower back, two on his right elbow, two on his left knee, one on his left shoulder and, last year, a procedure on his right ankle that still bothers him.

“I might need to redo that one,” he said.

In Beijing, Edin has led the Swedish team to a 6-0 record in round robin play, with three matches remaining before the semifinals on Thursday.

Many curlers can compete at a world-class level for a long time. Jennifer Jones, who skips the Canadian women’s team and won Olympic gold in 2014, is 47. The situation is different for Edin, whose dream could blow apart tomorrow. It is a small medical marvel that he continues to vie for medals at all.

“He’s a great guy with an interesting perspective,” said Marc Kennedy, the alternate for the Canadian men’s team. “His body is a mess.”

Edin, a four-time Olympian who grew up on a dairy farm in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden, about 300 miles north of Stockholm, had never heard of curling until the Swedish women won bronze at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Even so, Edin, who was 12 at the time, was not consumed by curling mania. He was busy playing tennis, soccer and ice hockey. When his mother told him that a local rink was staging a curling demonstration, he was not especially interested — until she recruited three of his best friends from school to check it out.

“I was like, ‘Wow, Mom, you’re so embarrassing,’ ” Edin said. “I basically had no choice but to go with them.”

At 16, Edin had proved skilled enough at the sport to earn a spot at a sports academy. At 18, he was a junior world champion, though he did not exactly board a rocket ship to fame and fortune. Curling as a revenue-generating sport was still in its infancy, and for several years, he made ends meet by doing odd jobs. He moonlighted as an ice maker. He taught children how to curl.

“I was just trying to make enough money to pay the rent,” he said. “But I kept playing because I thought we would one day become good enough to try it professionally.”

Before too long, Edin and his teammates were elite enough to attract the attention of Sweden’s Olympic committee, he said, which helped subsidize their costs so they could play and train full-time.

Amid his rise, Edin learned to cope with chronic injuries. Citing bad luck with genetics, Edin began having back problems when he was young. He had a herniated disk when he was 14 that shot searing pain down one of his legs, limiting his mobility for about a year and a half.

“I couldn’t really walk or stand up straight,” he said. “I was always crooked one way.”

He said most of his other injuries — the elbow, the ankle, the shoulder — likely stemmed from years of hard training. It should be noted that curling can be punishing on the body. No, really: Ask curlers about the toll on their backs and shoulders from all that sweeping, or about contorting their knees whenever they crouch for shots. Rasmus Wrana, one of Edin’s teammates, had an operation on his left knee in 2017.

“It’s one of those sports that puts a lot of tension on certain areas of the body,” Wrana said.

Edin, who has worked to preserve his career by lifting weights and has the sculpted build of a free safety, still worries about his lower back.

“Most days are fine,” he said, “but then all of a sudden it can just pop up.”

Such was the case at the world championships in 2012, when Edin had to be sedated and rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery.

“I didn’t even know what had happened until they woke me up and said, ‘Well, we had to remove quite a bit of your disk,’” he recalled. “That was extreme.”

Edin experienced a different sort of challenge at the 2018 Olympics, where Sweden was ranked No. 1 in the world and crushed Switzerland to set up a meeting with an underdog United States team in the final. There, Sweden took an early advantage before small mistakes began to pile up. The U.S., led by John Shuster, built such a large lead that Sweden conceded the match with several rocks to play.

“They had nothing to lose,” Edin said. “We had everything to lose.”

It was a loss that clearly stung the Swedes and could have haunted them for years. But less than two months later, they won another world championship. The victory was, in its own way, the start of a new Olympic cycle, and Edin has had an eye on Beijing ever since. For a small sport like curling, which does not otherwise benefit from much mainstream attention, the Olympics have outsize meaning.

“Everything has to be on point,” Edin said, “or you’re probably not going to perform at your absolute max.”

These days, he supplements his training by shooting pool, which helps him sharpen his mental focus, he said. He admires Ronnie O’Sullivan, one of the world’s top snooker players.

“I’m so impressed by how he can keep such extreme concentration,” Edin said. “Curling is similar in that aspect. It’s like if you have a math test at school, and then another one right after that, and you have to do that every day for eight days in a row — that’s the Olympics.”

By now, after so many years of injury-scarred wins, Edin knows all about tests. In Beijing, he hopes to ace his most crucial one yet.