Sports Illustrated - USA (2022-02)

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COMMUNICATION IS PIVOTAL in curling. Competitors

have to think several shots ahead, and strategy discus-

sions often take place among people 150 feet apart at

opposite ends of the rink—all while on the clock. (Teams

are limited to 38 minutes of “thinking time” per game.)

So it helps that two of the members of Team Peterson—

which has a good chance of earning the U.S.’s first Olympic

medal in the women’s competition—speak their own

language. Tabitha Peterson, the 32-year-old skip, and her

younger sister, Tara, are f luent in something called Iber,

which was invented by their mother, Gaye, and her sisters.

It involves adding ib after the first consonant sound of each

syllable (or just adding ib if there’s no consonant). The end

result—Ta bi t h a becomes Ti-bab-ib-ith-ib-ba—sounds like

Pig Latin spoken by someone who just got a novocaine

shot from the dentist.

Their teammates—Becca Hamilton, Nina Roth and

alternate Aileen Geving—have picked up a little bit of

Iber, but they’ve yet to use it on the ice, even if it would

be a wonderful way of disguising the team’s plans. “We

maybe should consider that,” says Tara, 30. “When we’re

playing the Russians and when we’re playing the Swedes,

we don’t know what they’re saying. We don’t speak those

languages. But everybody speaks a little English.”

For now, Team Peterson speaks that plain old decipher-

able language, which is probably just as well, because

there has been a lot to talk about in the past couple of

years. At the 2018 Olympics, Geving, Hamilton, Roth and

Tabitha Peterson represented the U.S., with Roth as the

skip, curling’s most important job. That player decides

which shot will be attempted and usually throws the final

two stones, which determine the scoring. It’s sort of a

combination of captain, manager and cleanup hitter, and

changing skips within a team is not common.

But in 2019, after Roth got pregnant, she told her team-

mates she was going to, as she tweeted, “take some time

to focus on cooking little Roth.” While she was on leave

Tabitha would skip the team, with Tara, who had come

on board when Geving went on maternity leave a year

earlier, filling out the squad. No one was sure what would

happen when Roth came back.

Roth had skipped the team to a first-place finish at the

2018 Olympic trials and three seconds at the nationals.

With Peterson as skip, the squad played exceedingly

well, winning the 2020 nationals and setting up a tough

choice. The team (with input from USA Curling and coach

Laine Peters) chose to keep Tabitha as the skip. Peterson

BEIJING WINTER OLYMPICS

ROLLING STONES

Though she no longer

skips, Roth (near left,

with Tabitha Peterson)

was a key contributor

at the Olympic trials.

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