Lino’s Life is Curling

By Doug Maxwell

Lino Di Iorio sits quietly at the big table in the lounge of the Donalda Club in Toronto.  It’s mid-afternoon, and he ahs already spent a full morning on the ice with some of Scotland’s best curlers.  At lunch, he and some of the Scots, plus Ed Werenich, Neil Harrison, and a visiting scribe talk curling, swap stories and think aloud about the game.  Lino signs the tab and wonders about the incoming team from Sweden, led be Elisabet Gustafson, four-time world champion and the Tre Kronor’s Olympic-bound women’s squad.  Did they get into their hotel OK, and when are they expected to arrive at the club?  Three Norwegian teams;  a junior foursome, plus Olympians Dordi Nordby and Paal Trulsen, have also been put through their paces by Lino in the morning and are now off on a shopping spree.

This is not exactly a curling clinic for top teams.  It is a chance for the Euro teams to do some advanced work with Lino, before heading to Ottawa and the big Cowan Wright Beauchamp bonspiel in Ottawa.

All these curlers are Lino believers.  Each of their countries has bought most, if not all, of Lino’s patented curling products, software and innovations.  Most of them sport his readily-recognized BalancePlus footwear (the slider with the hole in the sole).  These two days in Toronto offer the teams a chance to work with Di Iorio, engage in strategy sessions with Werenich and Harrison, and enjoy the hospitality offered by Lino and his wife Lynne.

He’s curled for just seven years

How did a 50-something, seven-year curler get to this point?  Good question.

“got hooked on curling from watching it on TV”, he says, “and decided I would try it at our neighbourhood club in Richmond Hill.  So that summer I recruited three friends who would join the club with me, and entered us in the club’s opening bonspiel.” Since none of them had ever curled before, it was easy to pick a skip:  “you organized this thing,” he was told “you’re the skip!”  It would be nice to report that they won the ‘spiel, but this is not a fairy tale where everyone lives happily ever after.  Fact is, they failed to win a game.  But more importantly, they became hooked on curling.  And none more so than Lino.

He soon turned his mathematical mind and inventive genius to the game.  Not for him the accepted wisdom of the past:  he asked questions, suggested ideas, sketched out theories – all based on the concepts taught him during his undergraduate days at the University of Waterloo, where he graduated in Mathematics and Physics.  He also had a background in manufacturing (he once built himself a guitar) and problem solving that stood him in good stead when it came time to translate ideas into reality.

One of his first developments was the BalancePlus® curing slider (the slider with the hole in the sole).  It’s the slider that Werenich credits for an improvement in his (formerly) wobbly delivery.  Today it is accepted as one of the “must have” items in a curler’s bag.  Since then Lino has added to his arsenal of curling aids.  He developed a rock throwing machine that helps match curling stones.  He came up with a variation of a radar gun that measures the rate of a curler’s delivery deceleration, an important element in trying to develop a consistent delivery for all four members of a team.  His TV camera, linked to a computer, becomes a key component in the drive for consistency.

Europeans became converts

All of these high-tech areas he has sole to curling bodies in Scotland, Sweden and Norway.  All of them are using Lino’s ideas to help develop and improve the elite squads they will send to face Canada in Salt Lake City come February.  More than that, it is Lino’s way of helping make curling even better than it was when he began to throw stones.  Where Canadian teams use the experience gained in a plethora of high pressure cashspiels, the smaller nations must, perforce, depend on every technical nuance they can find to hone their skills.  “We only have about 15sheets of ice in Norway,” explains Paal Trulsen, “and about 500 curlers all told, so we need the kind of help that Lino can provide.”

"The Scottish Institute of Sport has been enormously helpful to us,” says Hew Chalmers, the British Olympic Association curling team manager, who with National Coach Mike Hay, helps plot the readiness of Scotland’s Olympic teams, skipped by Hammy McMillan and Rhona Martin.

“It’s not only the S.I.S. that helps us,” says Chalmers, “but also the British Curling Association (under Bob Kelly) and the U.K. Institute of Sport.  We’ve received money from the national sports lottery – more than a million Canadian dollars – which ahs been invested in a wide-ranging four-year development program.

“There’s the ‘Curling’s Cool’ program for the grass roots, the school kids.  Eight regional development officers have been hired to help promote the game all across Scotland.  And there’s no stinting of money at the top level either.  Elite players, such as members of Hammy’s team, can access up to $12,000 (Cdn) each to help out.  It means they can work full time on their game over the four months prior to the Games.  Hammy, for example, has been able to hire someone to take over his general manager’s job at the (family) hotel in Stranraer.”.

Inside the broom? 

“You were inside (the broom)” shouts Hammy to lead Peter Loudon.  But Lino’s TV analysis, available immediately, says otherwise.  There then follows a lengthy team discussion about matching deliveries to skip’s perception of the release, and the assembled curlers quickly agree that Hammy’s (left-eye dominant) eyesight has tricked him into believing Loudon’s effort was inside the stick, a perception that could affect a sweeping call.

Later that afternoon, Ed Werenich and Neil Harrison talked strategy with different teams, answering queries with reminiscences from their many experiences at the Brier, the Worlds and other big events.

Will it all pay off in Ogden?  Perhaps.  More importantly, the curlers believe it will definitely pay off in curling developments back home, an important element to all of them.

In the case of Elisabet Gustafson, it paid off quickly.  In Ottawa, the following week, the Swedish women took home the $9,000 top money in the women’s division of the Cowan Wright Beauchamp.