If you have never heard about Inline Speed Skating before, this article can be your first step to falling in love with this wonderful sport.
If you already know Inline Speed Skating or, even better, you are or have been an inline skater, you already know the struggle of answering the questions:
“What sport do you practice?”
“Do you skate on the ice?”
“Can you do a triple Axel?”
“How long is a race?”
“Why don’t you wear protections?”
Of course we love to answer all these questions but, sometimes, it can be a little redundant.
From now on, every time you will be asked these questions, just refer to this article for a very-detailed explanation.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Sport is simple:
Footballers kicks footballs
Swimmers swim
Basketball players throw balls in a basket
Runners run (either in circles or on the streets)
Boxers throw punches
And sport become interesting because, at a certain point, someone thinks that he/she can do it better than someone else, or anyone else…
Inline Speed Skating is not an exception: I am skating, I meet someone else who is skating too, I think that I can skate faster or for longer distances than the other skater can, we decide to verify my hypothesis on a given distance, we race, someone wins.
At first it can seem stupid, like the other sports, but if you let two children play together in a park, it is highly probable that, at a certain point, you will find them racing or challenging each other to find out who can run faster, jump higher, or climb the highest tree. Competition is part of the human nature, it is a primary instinct.
So, we race to win, but why do we skate?
Well, we have seen that sport can be considered a stupid activity: there is no point in running in circles for hours, under the sun, during the winter, fighting leg pain and hurting feet. But we do it anyway; there is something special in getting your skates on and turn your brain off for a couple of hours with the only thought of where to put your next step to keep you balanced. It is YOUR daily dose of mental care, it YOUR space, it is YOUR time, it is just you and the next step.
It is simple… and it is enough!
To sum up, it is impossible to explain why people like Inline Speed Skating, everyone has its personal reasons, but there is only one thing for sure: although the Speed Skating Data project was born to bring objectivity in speed skating, skating is not objective, it is about feelings and emotions, and that can’t be explained… It is magical!
But if this is the first time you hear about Inline Speed Skating, I can help you understand more about this wonderful sport through a simple analysis of the three words that compound its name:
Inline
Everyone knows what inline skates are, if you are reading this article it is highly probable that you have tried to skate at least once in your life.
The sport is called INLINE skating because you need inline skates to compete. They are different from quad skates in which four wheels are paired and mounted on a frame that resembles a car chassis: shorter than the foot length, and wider that the foot width.
On the other hand, inline skates can mount three to five wheels (although the vast majority of skates’s setups involve the use of four wheels), one behind the other, so that they result in a line: narrower than the foot and, usually, longer than its length.
Although inline skates were invented before quad skates (the invention is attributed to John Joseph Merlin in the late ‘700, who wanted to adapt the practice of ice skating to the ground), the introduction of inline skates in speed skating is relatively recent and it can be traced back to the early 1990s, when the Rollerblade company, founded in 1979 by the Olson brothers, brought enough improvements to the inline skates, to make them faster and safer than quad skates. Before the revolution brought by Rollerblade, in fact, speed skating had been practiced for more than a century on quad skates that brought to the diffusion of skating as both a sport and a recreational activity in the skate rinks that started to diffuse during this period and are still very popular in the U.S. and Europe.
As a recent invention, the inline skates went through a rapid development and refinement process in every component in order to allow skaters to be faster and skate for longer distances.
Speed
As already said, speed skating is ultimately about speed. Every skater wants to be faster than yesterday and this desire, along with the development of technology, has led to the sport that we now know.
It is now relatively easy for a speed skater to hit speeds in excess of 40km/h during a marathon and 50km/h in a sprint. I am not Bart Swings, but during my stay in London, without a track to skate on, I used to go to the Richmond Park and skate side by side with road cyclists for hours at those speeds.
Skating
To sum up, Inline Speed Skating is about going as fast as possible while managing to balance on an extremely unstable device which rocks on the sides and rolls back and forth.
Skating has lots in common with definitely more famous sports like cycling, motor racing, running, and skiing. It would be interesting for every psychologist reading this article to try and understand the reasons why it is very common that speed skaters also practice or just like watching those sports too. My opinion is that there are some key words that can be used to describe each of these sports:
Speed
Racing
Rivalry
Danger
Sacrifice
Adrenaline
Pain
Skill
Joy
Modern Inline Speed Skating
A the start of the article we have seen that the vast majority of people have tried to skate at a certain point in their lives but it is very uncommon to see Inline Speed Skating teams or athletes training in front of you like you see cyclists on the streets. There are many reasons for that:
Inline speed skating is not that common and there aren’t as many skaters as cyclists
Skating in busy roads is extremely dangerous because skaters requires a street which is at least three meters wide to skate properly and inline skates aren’t provided with emergency brakes
A manhole or a crack in the asphalt is way more dangerous for a skater than for a cyclist
Therefore, with time, the sport has progressively switched from an open-roads sport to a closed-circuit sport and races regulations have grown in complexity to favour thrilling race dynamics.
Nowadays only marathons and ultra-marathons are raced in open roads like it happens in road cycling.
All the other races take place in two distinct types of closed circuits: track and road circuits.
Track circuits follow the following specifications:
The track length is between 165 meters and 200 meters, with the major international competitions usually taking place on 200m tracks.
Track width can vary but it is always greater than 6 meters.
Tracks must be symmetrical with two corners and two straights of the same length
Surface can be cement, asphalt or any material that guarantees a smooth surface with good grip. Recently, the implementation of outdoor synthetic resins gained popularity due to the unmatched grip and low rolling resistance this surface guarantees.
The corner geometry is the most peculiar feature of track circuits with two alternatives:
Parabolic banking corners: these tracks are characterised by being almost flat in the inner lane of the track with a progressive and gradual (parabolic) increase in the surface steepness as progressing from the inner to the outer lane of the corner.
Flat banking corners: these corners present a constant steepness from the inner track lane to the outer track lane.
Parabolic tracks are usually slower than flat banking tracks due to the facts that the greatest grip is only available when running the outer trajectory of the corner, while flat banking corners offers the same grip in the inner and outer trajectory. This principle allows skaters to choose different trajectories when skating on parabolic tracks with the likely of more spectacular races compared to the fastest flat-banking tracks in which every skater wants to occupy the inner lane to cover the shortest distance possible while grip is almost never a limiting factor.
The second type of closed circuits are Road Circuits.
Imagine closed road circuits like F1 circuits: any track is different from the other as long as it respects the following parameters:
the road course must have an asymmetrical layout.
it cannot be less than 6 meters wide at any point on the course
its length is usually between 350 meters and 500 meters.
the surface is usually made of asphalt
The Inline Speed Skating Family
One of the best aspects of our sport is that being an Inline Speed Skater means that you belong to a family of strange and different people that share the same strange passion.
And everyone express his/her passion in his/her own way. Therefore, what a better way to end this article than let some of you explain why you love this sport so much in your own words?
Why do you Skate?
“Because I love the speed, the games, the tactics, the people, and just being on my wheels”
“Because of the feeling when you are going hell fast, and the wind run down on the skin”
“For passion”
“Because it’s the best thing to get my head off”
Skating allows me to break free from the constraints of the ground, experiencing a sense of liberation with every stride.
“Because it's like flying close to the earth”
“Because the thrill of pushing myself to go faster and to beat my own records, is addicting”
“Because feeling the breeze on my face and the sun on my skin as I race across the pavement is pure bliss”
“Because when I skate, everything else fades away. It's just me, the road, and the rhythm of my skates”
“I skate because I love the challenge of pushing my body to its limits and surpassing them”
“Because skating has connected me with a wonderful group of like-minded friends
“Because skating challenges me to set goals and work tirelessly to accomplish them, and the feeling of success is unparalleled”
References
World Skate, Speed Rulebook, 2024
Comments