The first thing to understand about the Madtown Doubledown is that it is two tournaments wearing one name. On the "world side," 32 teams from as far away as Estonia, Norway, Switzerland, Japan and South Korea play a round-robin that feeds into a Saturday-evening quarterfinal and a Sunday afternoon final. On the "club side," 28 more teams — recreational curlers, many of them from Madison itself — run a separate, non-competitive bonspiel alongside them. The draw times are deliberately staggered so the two events can share the same six sheets of ice without tripping over each other.
That arrangement is unusual, and it is the point. The Madtown Doubledown, which runs Oct. 8–11 at the Madison Curling Club, is a rare chance to watch a genuinely international field of mixed doubles curlers — including a pair of local Olympians — in a building that still smells like a curling club rather than an arena.
Mixed doubles is curling stripped to its essentials. Instead of four players a side, there are two: one man and one woman. Games run eight ends rather than ten, and each end begins with two stones already in play — one near the button, one out front as a guard — which forces teams to think about angles and blocks from the first throw. Each team also gets one "power play" per game, a chance to rearrange those pre-positioned stones into a more aggressive setup. The result is faster, more tactical, and considerably more chaotic than the four-person game most casual viewers know from the Winter Olympics.
The sport's Wisconsin roots run deep. The Madison Curling Club was formally established in 1921, and for its first eight years members curled on a single sheet of ice under the bleachers at Camp Randall Stadium, on the University of Wisconsin campus. In 1930 the club moved to Burr Jones Field on East Washington Avenue, where — before artificial ice-making arrived — early bonspiels sometimes ran draws into the small hours because the ice simply wasn't ready until the weather cooperated. The club spent 79 years at that location before the City of Madison relationship ended, and in 1997 it built a six-sheet, $1.3 million facility in William McFarland Park in McFarland, where it remains.
Two of the club's Olympians are the reason this year's field has a hometown pull. Matt Hamilton and his sister Rebecca — Becca to most everyone — grew up at the club, dragged there by a curling family. Matt has said he didn't think the sport was cool when he watched his father play; he came around. Becca got hooked harder still, curling before and after school and playing in multiple leagues at night. In 2018 the siblings won the U.S. mixed doubles Olympic trials and went to PyeongChang for the debut of mixed doubles as an Olympic event, while Matt also skated out with the men's team that won the first-ever American Olympic curling gold medal. Both are entered in this year's Doubledown, listed on the team sheet as Hamilton/Hamilton out of Madison.
They will not have an easy time of it. The 2026 field is thick with international talent: Skaslien/Nedregotten of Oslo, Norway; Perret/Rios of Glarus, Switzerland; Kaare/Lill of Tallinn, Estonia; Kang/Kim of Jeonbuk, South Korea; Koana/Aoki of Yamanashi and Matsumura/Tanida of Nagano/Hokkaido, Japan. The round-robin results already logged show the kind of scores that come with that caliber of opponent — a 12–2 win for Matsumura/Tanida, an 11–0 for Kang/Kim, a 10–0 for Skaslien/Nedregotten. The Hamiltons opened with a 6–3 win over Turbow/Kot of Denver.
The Doubledown itself dates to 2018 and spent its first six years on the ISS Mixed Doubles World Curling Tour, where it was rated a 750 event on a scale that tops out at 1000 — a serious stop, not a friendly. Its purse has been listed at $26,000, one of the largest payouts on the mixed doubles tour. Registration for the 2026 edition filled and closed, with a waitlist behind it. The event is presented this year by Pizza Pit, a local sponsor, and free food and drinks are included for participants across the weekend — a detail that says something about how the club runs things.
That spirit is not incidental to the tournament's identity. The club-side bonspiel running in parallel means that on any given draw, a team of Madison club curlers may be throwing on the sheet next to a Norwegian pair fresh off the world tour. It is the kind of proximity that big-arena events can't manufacture, and it is why the Doubledown has kept its reputation as a welcoming stop even as its field got stronger.
The schedule is straightforward. The first draw goes out at 8 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, with subsequent draws at 9:45 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.; practice ice was available the previous afternoon and evening. Play continues Friday, then Saturday, with quarterfinals Saturday evening. The championship final is set for 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11. The Isthmus listing notes curling beginning at 8 a.m. Oct. 8–9 and 8:30 a.m. Oct. 10–11, and that tickets are available at the door.
That last detail is the one worth acting on. Curling is a sport that rewards being close to the ice — the sound of a broom on pebbled surface, the crack of granite on granite, the skip's voice carrying across the house. At the Madison Curling Club, you can stand near enough to hear all of it, watch an Olympic gold medalist call a line, and then walk past the club-side sheets where somebody's Thursday-night league team is trying to figure out the power play. For four days in October, the world's mixed doubles circuit and a McFarland club bonspiel are the same event. Tickets are at the door.