Italy Swooning for Its Newest Rock Star

Which helped him, over one week, change the perception of an entire sport in the host country. Italy had never appeared in an Olympic curling tournament before and the men's team gained entry here only because host nations are granted spots in every event. When a Canadian named Roger Schmidt was hired four years ago to build the Italian program from scratch so that it could be respectable come Olympic time, the sport was "not even on the radar," he said. "Not even one letter of it was on the radar."

To date, Schmidt said there are all of 150 curlers in all of Italy. And their prospects for the Olympics?

"They probably could have been speculated to win, on the men's side, one game," said Jim Henderson, who is covering the Olympic tournament for the curling magazine Sweep! "It was a tossup whether they could beat New Zealand going into the Games, and they would not be expected to beat, probably, anybody else, because there's no historical evidence to demonstrate that they could have beaten anybody."

Indeed, the Italians lost their first two matches by narrow margins. But then, they beat two teams expected to do much better, Germany and the United States. People began noticing. The stands at Pinerolo Palaghiaccio began to fill up for Italian matches. The crowds chanted and sang. People who had never heard of curling before the Olympics started to take note.

And when Italy bounced back from an 11-3 loss to Norway with -- can't be, can it? -- a victory over 29-time world champion Canada, people started tuning in even more, and Retornaz was stopped on the street to preach about his sport, about which Italians are almost wholly unfamiliar. It involves sliding a 42-pound stone across a long sheet of ice toward a target area while teammates sweep the ice in front of the stone to speed it up or direct it toward the desired spot. It is, Italians say, something like bocce, a game they understand.

"But it's very strange," said Andrea Miola, who traveled from Turin on Monday to watch his first curling match. "It's something about [which] the Italians don't know."

So it makes sense, then, that there were times during the tournament when the Italian crowd -- waving flags and chanting "I-tal-ia! I-tal-ia!" as enthusiastically as possible -- cheered at the wrong times and sat silent when they might have gone crazy. "They're learning," Retornaz said.

Monday, a gaggle of schoolchildren cheered Retornaz's every move, whether they knew what was happening or not. When Retornaz and his mates appeared before the match, the arena thundered with squeals, and the young man, the collar to his white shirt turned up, waved to the crowd. At the far end of the arena hung two banners that read "Forza Italia!" and "Forza Joel!" -- Go Italia! and Go Joel!

Alas, the most unlikely hero of these Olympics and his teammates met a quick end on Monday. Switzerland jumped out to a 4-0 lead, and Italy never recovered in a 10-2 loss. Afterward, Retornaz stayed on the ice a bit longer, waving and giving thanks as the Italian fans chanted "Jo-el! Jo-el!"

A life changed by a few slides of a stone and sweeps of a broom, it would seem.

"For me, even my town, I think they don't recognize me," Retornaz said. "It's brand new for me. I don't know if being recognized is going to happen or not [after the Olympics]. I still feel the same."