By Adam Laskaris

Yannick Schwaller is looking for fans to bring the noise.

On Friday, the Swiss skip took to Instagram to call out World Curling — the sport’s international governing body — for reportedly discouraging crowd noise at the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games.

“@worldcurling please stop disencouraging the crowd from being loud, let them go nuts! It is what curling needs. Awesome atmosphere by the Italians,” Schwaller wrote in an Instagram post published Friday.

“No discouraging here. We love the atmosphere,” World Curling commented, suggesting they weren't behind any attempts to shut down crowd noise.

“We love the atmosphere and agree with Yannick it’s great for curling,” they added in another post on X in reply to The Curling Group’s Devin Heroux.

(Edit: Schwaller has since removed the tag of World Curling after their comments, but has left the post online.)

But that was far from the end of the story, with other curlers also curious about the on-site attempts to mute the audience at the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium, and who exactly was behind them.

“Why was there ‘quiet please’ being projected onto the big screens?” Great Britain lead Hammy McMillan added on Schwaller’s post.

“The Sports Production team put it up after receiving a complaint about the noise. We've asked them not to put it up again.” World Curling replied to MacMillan, sharing the same sentiment in reply to fans on X.

McMillan has been a long advocate for louder crowds.

"Make as much noise as you want. Cheer, shout, everything. There's a bit of a misconception that you just have to sit there and watch," he shared while a guest broadcaster on Rock Channel at the HearingLife Canadian Open event earlier this season.

With three draws a day and more than a week of curling action left in Cortina, fans will have more than enough chances to bring the noise again. And at least according to World Curling, they'll be given every opportunity to do so, with the "Quiet Please" signs hopefully a thing of the past.

Schwaller's not the first player this event to cause a stir about how exactly a curling crowd should react.

In the mixed doubles tournament, USA’s Korey Dropkin started quite a discussion about curling etiquette en route to a silver medal. Dropkin’s emotions were on full display throughout the tournament, with hand-waves and bicep flexes to the audience defining moments of his week on the ice.

“I bring out a little bit more energy sometimes than I probably should. But I've been feeding off the crowd and trying to also push energy both ways," he told reporters after beating host Italy in the semifinal.

The Curling Group has reached out to World Curling for comment and will update the story accordingly.

Lead photo by Anil Mungal/TCG