Local relatives cheering for Olympic speed skater
Olympic speed skater Jordan Belchos spent his share of summers on Rice Lake in Keene and on a farm in Warkworth.
The 28-year-old Toronto native has family from the Keene and Warkworth areas cheering from afar as he competes in his first Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
Belchos finished fifth in the 10,000 metre long track race and is also competing in team pursuit and the mass start events.
Jordan’s father Michael Belchos’s mother Betty and his late father Bill cottaged on Rice Lake near Elmhirst Resort for decades. Betty has since remarried Ken Stillman of Keene where the couple resides.
Jordan’s mother Sandra’s parents Garry and Pat Sear have owned a farm in Warkworth since 1978 and have lived there full-time for the past 25 years while also wintering in Florida.
Belchos spoke to The Examiner about his local connections when he visited the Kawartha Quarks Speed Skating Club in 2012.
“It was sort of a short trip home,” said Belchos, at the time. “Growing up, I spent a lot of time on the farm and at the cottage on Rice Lake, so I’m pretty familiar with Peterborough.”
Garry Sear and Bill Belchos went to high school together in Toronto and later taught together at Central Tech. While summering in the Keene and Warkworth areas they would often get the families together and that’s where Michael and Sandra first met, said Sear.
They raised Jordan in Toronto and he was a promising hockey player. He entered an inline skating race one summer thinking he was a pretty fast skater only to lose to some speed skaters. In order to improve his skating he decided to take up speed skating. He progressed so well he was invited to compete at the world junior speed skating championships. It was at that point he gave up the hockey to move to Calgary and train full-time with the national team.
He was ill during the qualifying for the Sochi Olympics and didn’t qualify, said Garry Sear. So it’s rewarding for the family to see him in Pyeongchang after the disappointment of 2014.
“I don’t know what he’s going to do after this year, whether he wants to continue with his skating or not,” said Sear. “It’s gratifying to see him finally get to the Olympics because it is the ultimate. He came in fifth and I’m just so happy. It would have been ice if he’d won a medal but he’s still the fifth best 10k skater in the world at this point.”
Sear said illness, injuries, crashes, so many things, can disrupt the journey to the Olympics that it’s great to be able to watch his grandson racing there.
“They put in so much time and effort to get there. We’re just happy he’s there and we’re happy he’s competing,” said Sear. “It would be nice to have a medal but the fact is it’s just great to see him there after all the time and effort he put into it.”
Belchos also won a bronze medal in inline skating at the Pan American Games in Toronto in 2015.