Quirky curling has turned into a betting magnet at the Milan Cortina Olympics

MILAN (AP) — Hockey is the top Winter Games sport among gamblers, but curling with its sliding stones, spirited sweeping and cheating allegations has surprised oddsmakers.

Bettors are showing significant interest in the quirky sport, which piques viewers’ curiosity every four years at the Winter Olympics.

“There’s definitely a stronger curling-hockey split than what was expected,” said Chris Pearce, a senior trader at Caesars Sportsbook.

It's expected that the handle — the total amount wagered — on this Olympics will far exceed that of the 2022 Beijing Games mainly because legalized sports betting has expanded in the U.S. and these Games are easier to track live because of the time zone.

“The curling alone is going to take seven figures overall — it’s going to take a million dollars overall,” Pearce said. “If you would have told me at the start that that we’d turn over a million on curling, I wouldn’t have believed you, but there’s a lot of interest there.”

The International Olympic Committee says it closely monitors betting on Olympic sports to protect the integrity of the Games. The worldwide aggregate betting volume on the 2024 Summer Games in Paris was a record 11 billion euros ($13 billion), the IOC said.

Summer Games now have nearly three times the number of events than Winter Olympics so naturally get higher figures. But it’s widely expected that betting on Milan Cortina will far surpass that of the 2022 Beijing Games.

Pearce said they had already exceeded their Beijing mark “five or six days in.”

The curling competitions are being held in Cortina, where Sweden beat the U.S. to win the gold medal in mixed doubles. The men's and women's team events are in full swing, and the allegations of rule breaking has added a dash of controversy.

“It looks to be one of the more bet-on winter sports under ice hockey," said Christian Cipollini, BetMGM Sportsbook senior trading manager. “It’s kind of relatable, it’s an easy watch, you can understand it very quickly.”

Some other sports — like speedskating — are over in minutes. Curling takes hours and can include frequent lead changes.

“Curling is one that continues to go live, so that’s what ends up getting it more popularity from a handle standpoint,” Cipollini said.

The handle for a curling match, he estimated, is equivalent to that of a low-to-mid-tier college basketball game.

Olympic athletes in sports like curling, ski jumping and biathlon aren't exactly household names, so U.S. bettors tend to default to Americans, Cipollini said.

“It does appear the U.S. bettors, very much so, are more patriotic and willing to bet on their team kind of blindly, where the European countries it doesn’t happen so much,” he said, noting the longer history of sports betting in Europe.

Even when the athletes are well known, gamblers can be quite optimistic, like when they bet on Lindsey Vonn despite her skiing with a torn ACL. The American star crashed in the women's downhill and broke her leg.

Figure skating is a hugely popular Olympic sport but can be tricker with gambling because the outcome relies on judges' decisions.

“Basically any event for us, if USA is listed, that's the one that has the most amount of bets in it," Cipollini said. "Hockey is a little bit different because Canada is the favorite.”

The NHL-run 4 Nations Face-Off tournament one year ago proved popular with bettors. The showdown in the final — Canada beat the U.S. in overtime — was seen as an Olympic preview.

“If we get a men’s U.S.-Canada game, we think that will be our biggest bet-on hockey game of the year, including NHL finals, all the regular-season NHL games,” Cipollini said.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a ban on sports betting, but scandals involving athletes and officials have followed. Recent polling also suggests that Americans have become increasingly critical of the role of sports betting as bad for U.S. society and sports.

The National Council on Problem Gambling reports that the “rate of gambling problems among sports bettors is at least twice as high as among gamblers in general.”

Public health advocates like the Maryland Center of Excellence on Problem Gambling warn that problem gambling can lead to not just financial and legal problems, but also higher divorce and suicide rates, and can damage job performance. Gambling has become widespread on college campuses, and Common Sense Media recently found that children are also participating.

Advocates recommend apps such as GambBan and BetBlocker, which limit access to gambling sites externally.

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

United States' Auston Matthews, center, celebrates with teammates after scoring his sides fifth goal during a preliminary round match of men's ice hockey between Latvia and the United States at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

United States' flag barer Erin Jackson arrives during the Olympic opening ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Canada's Ben Hebert, Brett Gallant and Marc Kennedy compete during a men's curling round robin match against Switzerland at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Norway's Magnus Ramsfjell looks over the stones during a men's curling round robin match against China at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Scientists Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs and transformed modern medicine.

Many molecules come in versions that look alike but are not exactly identical, like right and left hands. One mirror image of the chemical carvone smells like mint, for example, while the other has a whiff of caraway, a spice often used in rye bread.

Even life itself prefers one mirror image over the other. DNA twists to the right, and the proteins in human bodies are made of mostly left-handed building blocks.

Versions of the same molecule can behave differently when interacting with other chemicals. When designing drugs to treat diseases, scientists want to be choosy about which mirror image they get. They want the version of a molecule to treat a cold, not one that will make the sniffles worse.

Kagan, who is from France, and Soai, from Japan, found ways to make chemistry pick a side, designing and manipulating reactions to produce the desired mirror image.

“This is probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry,” said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “Taken together, the groundbreaking discoveries by Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have reshaped our understanding of molecular chirality,” a term that comes from the Greek word for “hand.”

Scientists paid tribute to Kagan and Soai's work, which the Nobel committee described as a feat never previously achieved by anyone “other than life itself.”

“It might be difficult to say that this drug, or that drug, was developed using this,” Somfai said. “I would say all of them, because we use this as a tool, we use this as an understanding, how to develop catalysts, how they function.”

In the 1980s, Kagan’s work showed there might be a way to design reactions to produce one form of a molecule over the other. Years later, Soai perfected the process. He created the first-ever chemical reaction to efficiently produce only one of a molecule’s mirror images, in what’s now known as the Soai reaction.

“The medicines we have today would not be possible without this chemistry,” said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society.

Kagan, 95, is affiliated with the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. Soai, 76, is affiliated with the Tokyo University of Science.

The French Academy of Sciences, of which Kagan is a member, congratulated the two scientists and expressed its pride in the prize.

Neither the Université Paris-Sud nor the Tokyo University of Science immediately responded to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

“I’m very excited to receive the very nice news,” Soai told the committee and journalists by phone. “Of course this is one of the most exciting days in my life.”

He said he was shopping near his home when he was reached by the Nobel committee.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winner in Stockholm.

Last year, three scientists won the chemistry Nobel for their development of new molecular structures that can trap vast quantities of gas inside, laying the groundwork to potentially suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or harvest moisture from desert environments.

This year's prizes began with the Nobel for medicine, awarded Monday to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The physics award Tuesday recognized a scientist's efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos.

The literature prize is set to be awarded Thursday. After Friday’s peace prize is awarded, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, a small group of laureates or an organization.

This story has been corrected to clarify that Kagan, not Soai, is 95.

Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Dazio reported from Berlin. Associated Press journalists Alexa St. John in Detroit, Catherine Gaschka in Paris and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

Japanese chemist Kenso Soai, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, leaves home for a press conference, in Shiki, Saitama prefecture, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (Kyodo News via AP)

Japanese scientist Kenso Soai, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, leaves home for a press conference, in Shiki, Saitama prefecture, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (Kyodo News via AP)

Portraits of Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are shown on the screen as they are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 7, 2026. Photo: (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)

Portraits of Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are shown on the screen as they are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 7, 2026. Photo: (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)

FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)