Roomba Sneaks into Curling Match at Olympics

Vancouver – An iRobot Roomba appeared in the midst of an Olympics curling competition between Sweden and Japan yesterday, after being discombobulated by all of the brooms on the ice.

The autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner was navigating the stadium bleachers around 3PM when due to a wiring problem accidentally flew onto the ice, knocking two stones away from the target.

“It was cute, really,” Judge Edie Franklin said. “The little guy just wanted a piece of the action.”

The Roomba, whose shape and size are indistinguishable to that of the stones used in curling, remained undetected on the ice for another 10 minutes, until a Japanese referee noticed subtle movement.

“I’ve been judging these games for 35 years so I can smell a rat like that,” Dick Sweeney said touching the tip of his nose.

Curling is a team Olympic sport in which stones are slid across sheets of ice towards a target area accompanied by sweepers with brooms to heat the ice giving the stones greater potential to slide. It has been an official sport of the Winter Olympic Games since 1998.

The International Olympic Committee is currently hashing out the details for a new summer sport involving Roombas to counter the game of curling. Officials close to the committee have hinted that the game would involve a dirty maze the machines must clean their way through, and will exert even less energy than curling.

“The only duty available for humans would be turning the machine on, which I say would burn 5 calories,” Olympics historian Seth Feingold said. “But the strategy is in the program the Roomba would be set to, which will burn somewhere between 7 and 15 calories.”

When asked if it would be interested in participating in such a sport, the Roomba emitted a contact-sensing noise and flashed its infrared sensor.