> last I heard they banned brooms with directional bristles as they provided too much of an advantage.

Odd, could they not just give everyone brooms with directional bristles? then it would no longer be an advantage.

The new brooms fundamentally changed the nature of the game, greatly diminishing the importance of the skill of the thrower and the strength and athleticism of the sweepers.

The cat is now out of the bag. The techniques learned from using directional brooms have now created a completely different style of sweeping, based mainly on manipulating scratches in the ice rather than heating it. Directional fabric broom heads are banned, but the directional sweeping technique they spawned is here to stay. Not everyone in curling is happy about that.

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/curling/curling-s-broom-co...

If a sport or activity can be undermined by learning more about it, maybe it’s not much of a sport.

All games are played by an arbitrary set of rules designed to encourage a particular kind of competition. New equipment, new tactics or simply increasing skill levels may undermine critical aspects of the balance or challenge of those games. Practically all sports have tweaked their rules over time to ensure that the game remains fair, challenging and enjoyable to watch.

In the early 1950s, the NBA had a serious problem with boring, low-scoring games. Once teams had achieved a lead, they tended to run out the clock by passing the ball between each other and playing very defensively. In 1954, they introduced the shot clock, which effectively prohibited these stalling tactics and was widely credited with saving the game as a spectator sport.

Golf has regularly changed the rules to preserve the integrity of traditional courses. Better clubs, better balls and greater athleticism were making many holes almost trivial for professional players. Rather than destroying their heritage by abandoning iconic courses, they chose to regulate the equipment. They haven't just banned new developments - in many cases, they prohibited equipment that had been used in competition for many years.

In the case of curling, the directional brush heads revealed a new way of using old equipment. Traditional bristle brush heads were thought to be obsolete, but turn out to be extremely powerful if they are brand new, very stiff and used in a specific way. This combination of factors may be detrimental to the game as a whole. I think that it's entirely reasonable for the World Curling Federation to consider a ban on certain types of bristled brush head.

It's worth contemplating the fact that the ban on directional brush heads came entirely from the players themselves - prior to the ban, 34 elite curling teams signed an open letter saying that they would not use the new technology.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/top-curling-teams-say...

A real nice, fictional example is the one in Quidditch through the ages by Kennilw... er, JK Rowling. A whole section is devoted to stooging, a tactic to overpower the goalkeeper that was eventually banned because it made the game too boring (not to mention dangerous for the goalies).

A sport is defined by the artificial limitations placed on it. I could break the world record for the mile run if I were allowed to drive a car or use a bicycle instead of my legs. At some level there is a subjective evaluation of what the sport is about, and an evolving attempt to allow technological improvements to enter where they are in the spirit of the sport (like grippier gloves in football) and ban them when they change the nature of the sport too much (like superchargers in F1).

Except that in this case the previous poster was simply saying that the technique alone is the issue, not the tools.

Fair point, I concede. I took your statement to be wider in applicability than was clear from the context.

Can you imagine if the sweeping part didn't exist and someone came out and started doing it today? There would be rules against it so fast you wouldn't even be finished saying "neat trick" before it was banned. Stopping at directional bristles seems a little bit arbitrary.

Yup

If it makes things too easy then it can compress results to the point where the luck vs. skill balance in any sport is tilted too heavily towards luck. A lot of these improvements also have an impact downstream from the top-tier competitors; a $2000 broom may be nothing compared to the cost of fielding a top team, but can become pay-to-win at amateur levels and be something the governing bodies of a sport may want to avoid.

From my reading it is only meant as a training tool.

That is also my understanding. In fact the end of the article states they'd like to get the

> hardware light enough to embed in brooms used in competition so that real-time statistics can be broadcast on television.

but currently it's solely a training tool.

Using those sensors in competition wouldn't alter the skill/athleticism required of the athletes like the directional bristle broom. It would simply increase the amount of data that broadcasters / journalists have to work with, increasing the visibility of the sport.

Yes.