How is this game -- not sport -- an Olympic event?

	Ekaterina Galkina (l), and Nkeirouka Ezekh clear the ice for the stone during the preliminary round of the women's curling between Italy and Russia. Robert Laberge/Getty Images

If you knew that the preliminary rounds of Olympic curling began this week, you're probably on the team. The rest of us are even less interested in curling than Britney is in a car seat. And who could blame us? We're trying to watch the world's most prestigious televised competition -- American Idol -- and NBC keeps trying to show us this ridiculous "curling" game.

That's right, I said it: curling is not a sport, it's a game. You know, like shuffleboard. Or bocce. Or marbles. Actually, it's a little bit like all of them. And nobody would claim that shuffleboard is a sport -- except maybe Sol Shuffleboard, who invented the game in 1934 when he was the director of leisure activities at the Fountainbleu hotel in Miami Beach. But poor Sol is no longer with us, so there's nobody, then.

Sadly, curling isn't even as exciting as shuffleboard. Watch a match live, and you'll think you're watching a slow-motion replay. It's got to be pretty cold where you live to look at people curling and think it's more fun than your other choices of leisure activity.

If you've got questions about curling, and if you actually want them answered, you're in luck: NBC's Fred Roggin will be answering viewer e-mails during the network's Olympic curling coverage every weeknight. I plan to ask Fred which network executive got fired for deciding to broadcast curling every weeknight. Then I'm going to ask him why curling is even in the Olympics at all.

If bowling isn't in the Summer Olympics, curling has no business in the Winter Games. Win all the medals you want, it's still not a sport. Sorry, curlers, but when the players on the women's teams wear makeup during matches, it's not a sport. If there are people whose job it is to sweep up during the game, it's not a sport. Sure it requires physical skill, but so does painting, and I don't see anybody training to win the gold in pointillism.

Which brings me to how curling even made it into the Olympics in the first place. Just like most other Olympic events, curling first had to prove itself as a demonstration "sport." (Try telling your friends you're going to a curling demonstration. Then try to convince them you're not in hairdresser school.) So they held exhibitions in 1988 and 1992 and, while the rest of the world reacted with a collective "Huh?", the members of IOC thought to themselves, "Bitchin'!"