Bid for Olympic Curling Team Casts a Stone for D.C. Voting Rights

The Olympic team is not a wholly original idea. Back when the Rev. Jesse Jackson was the city's shadow senator, the toothless job that exists to lobby for voting rights, he talked about seeking a D.C. team. But someone must have turned on a camera in some other state; Jackson hurried off, and the idea got lost.

Panetta's ploy is the best grab for attention to the D.C. voting rights issue since Foggy Bottom resident Sarah Shapiro proposed back in 2000 to put "Taxation Without Representation" on D.C. license plates. (Panetta and friends' first attempt to win attention for the cause came last summer, when they tried to get the city to rename RFK Stadium "Taxation Without Representation Field," if only for the Nationals' Opening Day.)

On the eve of the opening of the Winter Games, Panetta hopes for a wave of publicity about our plight. As he tells clients at work, "It's easier to ride a media wave than to create one." The curling gambit -- the sport entails sliding a heavy stone into a goal area known as "the house" -- even provides a halfway decent slogan: "Let he who is without a vote cast the first stone."

After moving here from Connecticut for college, Panetta says, it took a few years to feel like a real Washingtonian. His moment of truth came last summer, when his boyhood favorites, the New York Mets, came to RFK to take on the Nats. Panetta heard himself hurling invectives at Mets catcher Mike Piazza. Shocked at his behavior, Panetta realized he had changed: "I am now a D.C. guy."

The Olympic bid is serious enough that the group is approaching the International Olympic Committee about membership, a multi-year process. D.C. voting rights advocates vote yes: "Anything folks do to draw attention to the voting rights issue helps," says Ilir Zherka, executive director of D.C. Vote. "The movement relies on people outside the District learning about the issue and taking action."

While the nascent organization begins its march through the Olympic bureaucracy, the curlers are training. They're heading back onto the ice, and they welcome newcomers -- District residents only. "We're serious about residency," Mike says. "After all, this isn't the Miss America contest."

Athletes in other sports are welcome, too. But if it's curling you want, you have to make your peace with one distressing fact: There's no place to curl in the District. The nearest curling sheet is in Laurel. The place is top-notch, the people there just lovely. But Panetta concedes that it feels slightly off: "It's like training in a foreign country."

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Thanks to support from readers of this column, Project Reboot, the Rockville volunteers who collect used computers and fix them for needy adults and students, has won a reprieve from the Montgomery County government, which had ordered the service to vacate a county-owned building. Reboot director Gerry Rosenkrantz received a letter from the county giving the volunteers an additional six months at their home; he plans to use that time to seek grants and space to keep Reboot running.

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