The OlyMNpics: Curling caught fire; which winter pastime should go for gold next?

Minnesota knows winter games.

Home to just under 6 million people, this state sent more athletes to the 2026 Winter Olympics than most countries. Thirty-seven athletes with ties to Minnesota were going for gold in Milan Cortina — and giving NBC viewers their quadrennial reminder that curling exists and you love it.

It wasn’t always so. Curling was included in the first Winter Games in 1924, then dropped like a stone. It took generations of lobbying and demonstrations to restore curling to full Olympic glory in 1998.

Your favorite sport might not be an Olympic sport now, but that could change. There was a time when critics thought snowboarding had no place in the Olympics. There was a time when Olympic skiers only raced down the mountains — not up, as they do in ski mountaineering.

Now that Olympic curling has taken the world by storm, which Minnesota winter pastime should go for the gold next?

The crowd went wild on the cross-country course Feb. 18 — but not for anyone on skis.

Nazgul, a 2-year-old Czechoslovakian wolfdog, bounded onto the course in the middle of a race, mugging for the cameras and following skiers down the homestretch to a photo finish. His owners told National Public Radio that the dog, who is “stubborn, but very sweet,” must have escaped from his doghouse at their bed-and-breakfast at the event site in Lago di Tesero.

Instead of waiting for a four-legged agent of chaos to disrupt an Olympic event, what if we invited them in? If sitting on a horse is an Olympic sport, then skiing with your dog should be an Olympic sport.

Every year in Minneapolis, snow-loving dogs and snow skiers gather on the shores of Bde Maka Ska for the City of Lakes Skijor Loppet.

The Scandinavians gave us skijoring — “ski driving.” Centuries ago, the Sami people harnessed reindeer to pull them along on skis. With no reindeer handy, modern skijoring usually involves horses, vehicles or an enthusiastic dog or two.

Some are purse dogs with a can-do attitude. Some are competitive teams that tear along the trails at blistering speed. All look like they’re having the time of their lives.

If Olympic crowds like skiing with dogs, they’ll love skiing with horses. In fact, they already have.

Minnesotans don’t have to wait for the International Olympic Committee to come to its senses.

This weekend, as the Winter Games wind down, Canterbury Park in Shakopee will convert its racetrack into a snowy obstacle course for “Extreme Horse Skijoring.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune once described Minnesota as “the center of the broomball universe.”

The game is played on frozen ponds and in ice rinks all over the state. It has all the fun and speed of hockey, without the skates. And all the sweeping of curling, without rocks and brooms. They use sticks these days, instead of brooms.

Minneapolis alone has more than 1,800 broomball players on 144 teams, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board estimates. The city’s history with the sport stretches back at least a century. Minnesota would crush this Olympic event.

Tobogganing used to be an Olympic sport. It debuted in 1928 and featured men in woolly sweaters sliding headlong downhill on wee sleds.

The Olympics immediately dropped tobogganing until everyone put on Lycra, rebranded it as skeleton and started sliding headlong down a hill at 80-90 miles an hour.

Let the bobsledders and lugers and skeleton people go for gold. But once the race is run, all those tracks and slopes are empty, which seems like a waste of a perfectly good sledding hill.

Let Minnesota show you what to do with a sledding hill.

There are sports that don’t belong in the Olympics, and sports that end up in the Olympics anyway.

Compared to that, watching Olympians bore a hole in the ice and fish on a frozen lake would be destination television. Something to cut to when you’ve seen one too many athletes crash or cry or confess infidelity to a global audience.

They could set up a live cam. No announcers. No running commentary. Just snow and ice and the sound of the wind.

One frigid February in 2019, St. Paul’s mayor and city council challenged Minneapolis to a snowball fight.

Combatants gathered at Como Park’s McMurray Athletic Fields. There would be three rounds. One for elected officials. One for small children. One for the big kids. The fighters took their positions and grabbed their snowballs. Eternal bragging rights and absolutely nothing else were at stake.

Minneapolis won a round, St. Paul won a round and the third round, and by mutual consent, it was declared a tie.

The idea: the best athletes in the world worked their hearts out to reach the Winter Games. After the medals are handed out and the tears are dry, the host country could make space at the closing ceremonies for piles of the best packing snow — and then invite the best athletes in the world to have a snowball fight. No judges, no pressure; just a reminder that Winter Games are supposed to be fun.