Continental Cup curling championship returns to Las Vegas

It’s been three years since the Continental Cup debuted in Las Vegas.

And it was more than a year before that when Jon Killoran went to the hotel sales manager at The Orleans and told him to put aside 500 rooms for the curling event.

“I thought (he) was going to fall over in his chair,” said Killoran, chair of the Continental Cup Host Committee.

Tickets for the 2014 event went on sale in January 2013. The Orleans booked 200 rooms per night in the first 48 hours, 500 rooms within the first 10 days and 1,000 rooms within the first three months.

This week, the Continental Cup will return to Las Vegas for the third time, beginning with the opening ceremonies Wednesday, followed by four days of competition. Enthusiasm for the event hasn’t waned since it was introduced in Las Vegas.

“We learned pretty quickly that there was a tremendous appetite for this iconic destination for curling fans to watch the sport they love,” Killoran said.

The Continental Cup will include 11 sessions and feature men’s and women’s teams from North America (United States and Canada) against teams from around the world (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and Japan).

The event was in Las Vegas last year for the second time and attracted 62,498 fans, shattering a U.S. record for a curling event — about 8,000 more than attended the event for the 2002 Olympics, Killoran said.

This year, Killoran said about 55,000 are expected to attend. A majority of them — like every year — will be Canadian.

“We’re taking one of Canadian curling fans’ greatest winter pastimes and then bringing it to a city that over 1 million Canadians visit for any reason per year, and it’s kind of a marriage made in curling heaven,” Killoran said.

But he estimated that this year about 10 percent would be from the United States, an increase from years past.

“The first year we had it, you could have counted the U.S. curling fans that came out because we really had no good way of reaching out to them,” Killoran said.

But now, with Curling Night in America on NBC Sports Network, the popularity in the sport is growing and drawing more Americans.

“That number is growing real nicely,” Killoran said. “We hope to help grow the sport in the United States so more people participate and are interested in coming to see it.”

Many of the eight American curlers will be making their first Continental Cup appearance. They will be trying to help Team North America extend its Continental Cup winning streak to five years.

Like last year’s event, which came down to the end when Team North America took a 30.5-29.5 victory, Killoran is expecting play to be close again.

“From a competition standpoint, the world team has come in and they’ve done the best they can to stack their lineup because they came within a whisper of winning it, the last shot last January,” Killoran said. “Team North America has won it four years in a row, so I think the world team is very motivated to get a victory this year.”

Contact Betsy Helfand at bhelfand@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BetsyHelfand on Twitter.