Time to skate here?
Speedskating base must return to grow
Move U.S. Speedskating back to Milwaukee, Gary D’Amato says.
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – Long-track speedskating is dying at the club level, once the lifeblood of the sport. And as we have seen at the Pyeongchang Games and four years ago in Sochi, the U.S. team struggles to win Olympic medals.
Moving the national team back to Milwaukee wouldn’t be a cureall, but it would be a start.
It’s not just about podium finishes. It’s about giving elite skaters their best chance to succeed and about growing the sport, which will be difficult but not impossible.
When U.S. Speedskating relocated its national team from Mil-
waukee to Salt Lake City in 2001, there was good reason to do so. The Utah Olympic Oval had just opened and would host the longtrack competition at the 2002 Winter Games.
The U.S. team trained at altitude on its home ice and put on a show in the Olympics, winning three gold medals and eight overall. Derek Parra (1,500 meters) and Chris Witty (1,000) set world records.
Bolstered by inline legend Chad Hedrick and the ascending Shani Davis (who didn’t train with the national team), the Americans won seven more medals at the 2006 Winter Games. Then came four medals in Vancouver in 2010 and none in Sochi.
It’s not hard to see the trend. If the women’s pursuit team hadn’t skated the race of their lives to win bronze at the Gangneung Oval, the long-track team would have left South Korea with zero medals for a second straight Games.
That’s untenable for an organization that had won 67 long-track medals going into Pyeongchang.
The problem is that U.S. Speedskating fell in love with altitude training, but most of the world’s indoor ovals – including the ones in Sochi, Pyeongchang and Beijing, site of the 2022 Winter Games – are within a few hundred feet of sea level.
With reduced air drag at altitude, skaters glide farther with each stroke in Salt Lake City than they do just about anywhere else. They’re faster. But when they skate on sea level “working ice,” a different technique is required.
“The sports scientists are telling you to train at altitude,” said Mike Woods, a threetime Olympian who studied biology and physiology and is an anesthesiologist. “But the sports scientists never put on a skate. It’s not that simple.”
Woods explained that because the speed and length of the glide is different at altitude than it is at sea level, skaters sometimes have trouble adjusting to slower ice, especially when setting up turns, where hundredths of seconds can mean the difference between the podium and sixth place.
“It’s like a swimming pool,” Woods said. “If you miss a turn in a race, you’re screwed.”
U.S. Speedskating recognized it made a mistake by holding its 2014 Olympic trials in Salt Lake City and then sending its longtrack team to an outdoor rink in the mountains of Italy before the Sochi Games.
Most of the athletes had never skated outdoors and windy conditions made it impossible to gather useful lap time data. In Sochi, a new skin suit became the scapegoat for their poor showing, but it wasn’t the suit. They weren’t properly prepared.
Going into the Pyeongchang Games, the federation held its trials at the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee and then had the skaters stay in Milwaukee for their preOlympics camp.
That was a good move, even if the results weren’t great in South Korea. With Brittany Bowe having lost a year of training to a concussion, Heather Bergsma struggling once again on the biggest stage and Shani Davis past his prime, this is not a strong U.S. team. Still, there were 11 top-10 finishes.
For the future, U.S. Speedskating should flip-flop the way it uses its two indoor ovals. Base the team in Milwaukee and hold highaltitude camps in Salt Lake City. Not the other way around.
“Milwaukee absolutely is the better place,” said Leah Poulos Mueller, who won two world sprint titles and three Olympic silver medals and was inducted into the National Speedskating Hall of Fame. “I think there’s a way to use both facilities, but I think there’s a lot to be said for being in Milwaukee.”
The other problem speedskating faces is declining participation. Speedskating clubs once dotted the Midwest, and the West Allis Speed Skating Club – which produced Dan Jansen and Witty, among others – had hundreds of members. That club has merged with other clubs to form the Wisconsin Speed Skating Club, but many clubs have folded and membership is down everywhere.
“There used to be an Amateur Skating Union in the U.S.,” said two-time Olympian Erik Henriksen, who competed in the World Sprint Championships every year from 1981’88. “It got absorbed into U.S. Speedskating, and the results speak for themselves.”
Said Poulos Mueller, “We don’t have clubs anymore. How do we reach our kids? We don’t do it by moving to Salt Lake City.”
The population of greater Salt Lake City is about 1.1 million. Compare that to the more than 12 million people who live within 100 miles of the Pettit Center.
U.S. Speedskating, which has depended on the inline community for its elite skaters in recent years, should move back to Milwaukee and do everything in its power to support youth skating programs, mine schools for athletes and bolster clubs.
If so, perhaps, we’ll see a new crop of talented U.S. athletes on the Olympic podium in 2026 and beyond.
If not, well, get ready for the same old, same old.