Hurry Hard !

Participating in the Olympics is costly and requires sometimes creative ways to raise money and awareness of you, your team and sport.

Curling is one of those Olympic sports that is ALWAYS looking for sponsors.

Curling also involves shouting instructions at your teammates and calling out the line and speed of the stone you just threw.

One often shouted term is "Hurry Hard".

Hurry Hard means for the sweepers to well, sweep faster and harder.

When watching curling, it is pretty easy to hear them shouting this out from time to time.

So, a few USA curlers were sitting around one day just shooting the breeze and trying to think of new ideas for raising money. After all, they had already come up with the idea of having people paying $30 to test your skill against Shuster and the Olympic team. Pretty cool, but they needed more in order to go to the Olympics.

When out of the blue, someone joked that "hurry hard" would be a good name for a condom.

The idea was then mentioned to Kodiak chairman Dan Field, who had a connection to MCAP, and the program took off from there. USA Curling informed the U.S. Olympic Committee of the project before announcing it.

"HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention is a noble cause and the USOC, much like the IOC, certainly supports sport playing a role in tackling these and other terrible afflictions," USOC spokesman Patrick Sandusky said.

A worthy cause, and partnership.

However, I quite possibly will never look at the curling stone the same way again.

You can find out more about the sport of curling, the athletes and other sponsors here.

You can ummmm "help raise awareness" here.