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The fast and the curious (page 2)
Like many Canadians who grew up on hockey skates, I have a lot of questions about the long blades. Like: How speedy are they? Where can I try them? And how can I avoid a face plant?
By Jerry Kobalenko with photography by Todd Korol
I'm not exactly inactive - last year, I spent four months in
a tent in the Arctic, kayaking, skiing and backpacking. And
although my speed-skating cred is nonexistent, I love to skate.
In the Rockies, where I live, the best time of the year are those fleeting days in November or December between freeze-up
and the first snowfall, when we aficionados take to the glassy
surface of alpine lakes. A local moccasin telegraph alerts fellow
skaters the minute a particular lake freezes. Sometimes it's
Johnson Lake, sometimes Backswamp, sometimes Lake
Minnewanka. We drop everything to go skating. Two years ago,
even Lake Louise was skatable for three days. Before a heavy
snowfall put an end to the fun, you could glide from the chateau
to the far end of the lake in about five minutes. Sheer magic.
Canada had this passion for ice long before the dawn of hockey
madness. Some of French explorer Sieur de Monts's men skated
on a pond near Canada's first settlement on St. Croix Island in New
Brunswick in 1604. Three British army officers reportedly raced
250 kilometres along the St. Lawrence River between Montréal
and Québec in 1854. Although that event is probably more lore
than fact, Britons adored skating races at the time, and some officers
in the New World might have imitated their heroes from the
Fens of eastern England, champions with improbable names
such as Larmann Register, Gutta Percha See and the immortal Fish
Smart, who competed for glory and large shanks of meat.
By the 1870s, skating had achieved fad status in Canada.
In 1897, Winnipeg's Jack McCullough won the world speed -
skating championship. As hockey became ascendant, Canada's
dominance receded somewhat. And although Canadian speed
skaters performed modestly at the 1988 Calgary Olympics,
those Winter Games changed everything by giving athletes a
home-grown, world-class facility.
Indoor ovals are exceedingly rare in the world; there exist
more Fabergé eggs and Rembrandt masterpieces. The temporary
Richmond Olympic Oval ice aside - it will become a general sports centre after serving as a venue for the 2010 Olympics -
Calgary has the only indoor oval in the country. While short-track
speed skaters compete on Olympic-sized hockey rinks, the more
familiar long-track skaters require a larger, more expensive facility.
Two NHL-size rinks would fit in the middle of the ice at the
Calgary Oval, which costs about three million dollars a year to
run. Because of its altitude, Calgary is considered one of the fastest
ovals in the world. It becomes even faster when low-pressure
chinooks further reduce air resistance - an important consideration
in speed skating, which is the world's fastest sport unaided
by gravity or machines. Sprinters surpass 60 kilometres an hour.
The years after the 1988 Olympics have seen the dawning of
a Golden Age of Canadian speed skating, dominated by world
beaters such as Cindy Klassen, Clara Hughes, Jeremy
Wotherspoon and Catriona Le May Doan.
LE MAY DOAN MAY BE SKATING slightly slower today, six
years and two children after her retirement, but the pace of her
life hardly seems to have eased. When we met at her Oval office,
she had just returned from Wayne Gretzky's celebrity golf tournament,
where she had won a new car by out-golfing, among
others, Donovan Bailey, Charles Barkley and the Great One
himself. During our conversation, her pink BlackBerry buzzed several
times a minute. She is the Oval's associate director, lectures
to corporations and serves with various sports groups and charities.
She lobbied for Vancouver's bid to host the 2010 Olympics
and co-hosts speed skating coverage on CBC. She even helped
design a sports bra. "I do have a private life," she says, "but most
people in Canada know who I am and most things about me."
Sports fans commit emotionally to their heroes and feel
let down when they don't deliver. But Le May Doan always
seemed to win her most important races and is the only Canadian to successfully defend an Olympic gold medal, which
she won in the 500-metre races in 1998 and 2002.
As Le May Doan and I skate our (to me) stressful laps around
the Oval, she says "people don't understand how fast speed skating
is, or how technical." Not only is the doubled-over position
agonizing to maintain when lungs and thighs are bursting for
relief, but a well-schooled stride carefully maximizes the blade's
contact with the ice. It begins on the outside edge of the blade,
feet almost together, and ends far to the side of the skater, on
the inside edge. The lower you are, the longer the stride. It's a
very precise cycle that has been compared to trying to do a golf
swing while running 800 metres. "In speed skating, you have
to slow down to go fast," Le May Doan says about this need for
precision. At the end of our skate, I was relieved that I had at
least been precise enough to avoid a face plant.
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