With some of the greatest athletes of the world assembled in Beijing, the sporting competition opened Wednesday with a rock sliding down some ice.
A full 48 hours before the opening ceremony, mixed doubles curling stepped to the fore to open the Olympic Games on Wednesday evening. Rather than a typical curling team of four members of a single gender, eight teams of one man and one woman slid their stones down the sheet — curling’s long icy pathway — to the house, those rings of scoring circles at the end of it.
The evening’s schedule saw four matches get underway simultaneously at a mostly quiet Beijing National Aquatics Center, where Michael Phelps won so many medals in unfrozen water.