After being found by the sport, Frei wants his hometown to embrace it
Not too long ago, Alan Frei was an entrepreneur neck-deep in the startup grind. He eventually struck gold in e-commerce, but not without his body paying a hefty tax for the hustle.
So he set out to make changes.
“I wanted to become really fit, because I was very unhealthy after I sold my company. I was overweight,” he told the Inquirer in a recent sit-down hosted by Buffalo’s Wings N’ Things in Quezon City.
To make his quest interesting, Frei, born to a Swiss father and Filipino mom who grew up in Leyte, gave himself a target very few manage to hit: the Olympics.
“So my decision was I wanted to be as fit as possible and go to the Olympics, which is the highest thing you can do in sports, right?”
Frei thought his path was going to be through cross-country skiing. He quickly realized he “had no talent” for it. Curling was the next choice, though he knew he had no innate gift for that, either.
The fourth member
He needed a miracle to make that work, which is exactly what happened when he met Christian Haller, another Filipino Swiss whose club was in dire need of a teammate.
The squad was scouring places for a fourth member, even asking every Asian-looking competitor they ran into in competitions if they were Filipinos.
“They’d ask, ‘Are you Filipino?’ and the answer was always no. Indonesian, Thai … ” Frei recalled. “So they never found a fourth one, so they contacted me, and then I decided, you know what, let’s give it a try. I can’t be worse than in cross-country skiing, and so that’s why I say curling kind of found me.
“They had no choice, right?” he asked with a hearty laugh.
Turns out that miracles continue choosing him.
While most elite curlers start young and spend years honing their craft, Frei had to learn the ropes in just two years. Frei’s coach had tempered expectations, even telling him upfront that “We can’t create a full-fledged curler out of you.”
And yet, Frei, now 42 years old, looked like just one when he, Haller, Enrico, and Marc Pfister of the 51st-ranked Philippine team held their own against battle-tested nations littered with pros on the way to the gold medal in the 2025 Asian Winter Games in Harbin, China.
The feat, which gave the Philippines its first-ever medal in the Asian Winter Games, also put Frei at the cusp of what he has long yearned for, which is competing in the Olympics, the winter kind.
With the two dreams now reality, Frei has embarked on a new chase. This time, a much more noble one.
In a country where basketball reigns supreme and curling is nothing more but a niche sport that commands curiosity at best and online comic relief material at worst, Frei is looking to affect change.
“You know, it was always a dream of mine to become a meme,” he went on with a chuckle.
“I’d like to be a part of that,” he said of the sport with the hope of it becoming big at home. “I believe it’s important for the Filipinos to see that there are other sports besides basketball, right? Where we even have a gold medal, right?”
