Short track championship still on despite missing mats
The Medicine Hat Speed Skating Club is excited to be hosting the Canadian Youth Short Track West Championships this year, but an unfortunate incident nearly stopped this honour in it’s tracks.
Legacy equipment from when the city hosted the Alberta Winter games, valued at approximately $90,000 was discovered to have gone missing last week, said Lorelei St Rose from Speed Skating Alberta.
“They don’t use them all the time. It’s more kind of for competitions, you kind of bring all these half mats out and mats for a full set of competition mats,” said St Rose. While their training mats are kept in the facility, the competition mats were kept in a transport trailer on the property of a resident affiliated with the club.
“They’ve been there since 2016. We hosted a competition there in 2022. We use all the mats who hauled them over to the facility competition, brought them back, put them back in the trailer,” said St Rose. “Now that we’re hosting Canadian national track championships, West in Medicine Hat they went to check on the mats to make sure they were in good shape, and the trailer was gone.”
A report has been filed with the RCMP, said club president Emma Piayda, but currently they are unaware of the time frame in which the trailer went missing, as it was not checked often.
“One of our parents went out to make sure that the mats were in good condition, because we have a competition coming up in a couple of weeks,” said Piayda. “It was a new parent. And so we thought, Well, maybe he didn’t go to the right field. So I went out there. And yeah, sure enough, the trailer just wasn’t there.”
Piayda said that the movement of the trailer was almost the most baffling part as it was not in condition to be driven easily even with the necessary semi-truck that would be required.
“I would have had to have good weather as well because the ground there is really soft it’s private property. It’s all fenced off like there’s a barbed wire fence around most of the property. So it would have been really difficult actually, for them to get this trailer,” said Piayda.
This occurrence would have made it impossible for the club to host the upcoming championships, if not for the generosity of the clubs in Lethbridge and Canmore.
However, transporting the large number of mats required from remote locations will incur unexpected costs, and this is far from a long-term solution, said Piayda.
Piayda expressed gratitude to the other clubs for their help, and that while this is a setback, the club is far from through, and encouraged residents to come and see them for themselves at the championships, which will take place at the Big Marble Go Centre from March 22-24.