08/02/2026
THE SUNDAY BEL AIR DISPATCH
Your Sunday Coffee mate
By Gilbert Pool - GPS Seychelles
Ice in Paradise: Seychelles' totally realistic path to Winter Olympic Glory
Might rhe sport of Curling just be our path to the holy grail?
Sorbet is traditionally served as a palate cleanser in the middle of a multi-course meal, specifically after the appetizer or fish course and before the main entrée.
It acts as an intermezzo, refreshing the taste buds for the heavier main course, though it can also be served as a light dessert.
Take this as my sorbet offering between President Patrick Herminie's State of the Nation Address and Minister Pierre Laporte's forrhcoming Budget Address.
As I watched the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, something occurred to me while Madagascar's lone skeleton athlete marched past the cameras. If they can do it, why can't we?, I thought.
And then there was Haiti, and Guinea-Bissau, and Hong Kong, Kenya, and Singapore.
AS SERIOUS AS I CAN BE
I'm being completely serious here. Well, as serious as one can be when proposing that a nation sitting 4.6 degrees south of the equator, where our biggest ice-related concern is whether the freezer at STC's Hypermarket is working, should compete in the Winter Olympics.
But hear me out. Madagascar, Haiti, Guinea-Bissau and Singapore aren't exactly countries known for their après-ski culture. Yet there they were, living the dream while we sat at home where the temperature tonight will drop to a bone-chilling 24 degrees Celsius.
I wiped the tear that ran down my cheek as Andrea Bocelli belted out Nessun Dorma, and considered the imaginable feat.
"Disappear, night
Set, stars
At dawn I will win
I will win"
The thing is, we Seychellois have always punched above our weight. We're 115 islands with roughly 100,000 people, and we've sent athletes to every Summer Olympics since 1980 in Moscow.
Sure, we haven't won a gold medal yet, but that's beside the point. The point is we show up. We compete. We make our presence known.
So why should winter sports be any different? Just because we've never seen snow outside of a YouTube video doesn't mean we can't master it.
LET'S BE PRACTICAL ABOUT IT
Let's be practical about this. We're not going to produce a competitive figure skating pair overnight, though I'd pay good money to watch someone attempt a triple axel in flip-flops during training.
And ski jumping seems unnecessarily complicated when you consider our highest point is Morne Seychellois at 905 meters, hardly the Alps.
But Curling? Now we're talking. Now we're dreaming. It's basically shuffleboard on ice. We've got shuffleboard at the yacht club, have we?. How different can it be? You slide a stone, you yell incomprehensible things at your teammates, you sweep furiously.
We're excellent at sweeping. Our grandmothers sweep their front steps every single morning. This is clearly our entry point.
WE'D NEED ICE OBVIOUSLY
The logistics are where things get interesting. We'd need ice, obviously. The ice rink at Eden Plaza died in our imagination.
But surely we could resurrect it. Call it a matter of national pride. Make it a tourist attraction. "Come to Seychelles: Sun, Sand, Sea, and Surprising Winter Sports Excellence."
Training would require some creativity. Our athletes would need to spend significant time abroad, presumably in places where winter actually exists. Switzerland seems nice. Norway has good curling programmes. Canada's far away but they seem friendly. But they might already be living there.
We'd essentially be asking our future Olympians to leave paradise for months at a time to live somewhere with actual seasons and weather that can kill you. The patriotism required is staggering.
Then there's the question of who would do this. Which Seychellois wakes up one morning and thinks, "You know what? I'm going to dedicate my life to Curling, a sport I've never seen in person, in conditions that don't exist in my country, for the slim chance of representing my nation at an event where we'll almost certainly finish last"?
THE KIND OF MADNESS THAT DEFINES THE OLYMPICS
Actually, now that I've written it out, that sounds exactly like the kind of beautiful madness that defines the Olympic spirit.
The truth is, every Winter Olympic athlete from a tropical nation is essentially living proof that humans are capable of magnificent stubbornness. They're saying: "Geography is not destiny. Climate is not fate. If I want to hurtle down an icy track at terrifying speeds despite having grown up where ice only exists in cocktails, then that's exactly what I'm going to do."
There's something genuinely inspiring about that level of determination. It's the same spirit that drove our tiny nation to independence, that builds our economy on sustainable tourism, that protects our environment while developing our future.
Would it be ridiculous? Absolutely. Would it be expensive? Sort of. Would we probably come in last place in whatever event we chose? Almost certainly.
JUST IMAGINE THE MOMENT
But imagine the moment. Imagine a Seychellois athlete or two walking into that Olympic stadium, our flag flying, our anthem playing, representing our islands on a global stage in an event nobody ever expected us to enter. Imagine the pride. Imagine the story we could tell.
Madagascar did it. Haiti did it. Kenya's doing it. They're proving that the Winter Olympics aren't just for countries with mountains and snow and people who voluntarily live in places where water freezes.
So here's my pitch: Seychelles at the 2034 XXVII Winter Olympics in Utah, USA. Mark it down. Start the GoFundMe. Find someone or a pair willing to master Curling.
Curling is a sport in which players slide stones on a sheet of ice toward a target area that is segmented into four concentric circles.
Because if we're going to dream, we might as well dream big. And frozen.
Who knows? Maybe someone reads this and actually does it. Stranger things have happened. Just ask Madagascar's skeleton athlete.
Or maybe our future Curling team is already living in a cold country where there's already ice, and all they would need to do is own up to their Seychelles roots.
Just remember, the seed was planted here!