An Olympic arena’s house band is devoted to a sound, not stones. “I honestly don’t know much about the rules,” one musician said. “What we like most is the bagpipes.”
BEIJING — The curling arena darkened and strobe lights blotted the ice. A band of bagpipers marched in almost like a vision from another time, or at the very least, another continent.
The musicians are self-described amateurs mostly from Beijing. None of them have ever been to Scotland. But they were dressed as though they had just arrived from the Highlands: red plaid kilts adorned with the little pouches with long tufts of horsehair known as sporrans, all part of the uniform they had ordered from abroad.