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Curling Congress No. 7.

A meeting of curling sports officials at the highest possible level. Discussion of sporting issues with overlap into politics and a concentrated effort to improve the prestige of curling compared to other sports. This is the annual September congress, this time held in Budapest. From the perspective of curling, the Olympic sport, it was certainly a momentous few days in which important decisions were made, a contract was signed for the venue of the World Championships qualifier, but also a wide-ranging debate developed on achieving gender parity not only in the governing bodies of sports corporations but also in participation, for example, in the Olympic Games. Indeed, the phrase 'gender equality', which, given the quality of the Russian international delegate's English accent, sounded a bit like the quality of gender, or the quality of gender, came up many times. As if that were a problem. Televised curling from Pyongyang was more watchable in the women's section, just as more tickets were sold for the women's section of the competition (97.5% of capacity). The proportion of female Winter Olympics participants in the total number of athletes is growing significantly and is slowly approaching parity with the men. These are encouraging numbers for women's curling, as in the past the men's championships were more well attended. Now it seems that we will have to help the male curlers to make their competition more attractive. Just kidding. I don't feel that gender equality is an issue that needs to be significantly addressed in our sport. Curling is perfect at this. At the Olympics, we have an equal number of men and women competing, and we confirm this by competing in mixed doubles, a symbol of parity. We can be happy with that.