Funding Drive Starts Soon, Italy Videos, Skaters Look Good On Billboards, Aaron's House Members, Links (Junker, Skatefan, & Skating Sisters)

Funding Drive Starts Soon: At last, school's out for summer! I can now focus more on skating. Now that I take a few seconds and think about it, I don't think that it's possible to be more focused since I am already consumed by our sport. As I am writing this, I am chatting with Jacky Shu about technique, with Guido Ferra (webmaster of PatinCarrera) about the Pan Am games, and I am watching my skating friends' MSN coming online at all times.

I will be launching the SSW Funding Drive early next week, so keep your mouse and web browsers pointed and aimed at Speed Skate World. There's a good chance that next week, you'll be treated to pictures, videos, and reports from this weekend's RSO Speed Series race & Canada Day Marathon. They should be good! The Canada Day Marathon takes place this Sunday- on Canada Day. For you non-Canadians out there, Canada Day provides Canadians with a long weekend- a chance to go to cottages, beaches, water parks, have BBQ's, skate, and of course celebrate Canada!

Italy Videos: Lega Nazionale Hockey has some videos that just might interest you. Put your mouse over this hyperlink, yes, that's right, here and you'll be taken to the racing videos which include indoor Italian champs in Adria, Bonomia Fini Sport Roller marathon in Bologna April 2007, Italian marathon in Savona in April 2007, and the Italian track championships. Enjoy!

Skaters Look Good On Billboards: It's true, isn't it? Don't Skaters look awesome when they grace billboards? I recall people talking about Ed Leung and Andrew DelJunco being featured on a billboard for condos- well I finally saw a picture of it; looks good (see below). Candy Wong put up a few renditions of what billboarded skaters would look like-


Ed Leung and Andres DelJunco on the billboard

Somewhere probably in Toronto- from Candy Wong

Times Square- from Candy Wong
Aaron's House Members: Aaron Arndt is living with some pretty good company- below are the bios of his house members. Before I embed the bios on the side, I'd like to direct you to Aaron's report on the Sursee world cup. As we're learning to expect, it's a good read. I love to quote what Aaron writes. It provides good material for SSW- 'So, along the open roads, the pack had complete freedom. The surface was fast and grippy, and we had both lanes which we covered easily with the skaters. Good ones too. From this point on, there is so much movement in the pack, I can’t even begin to explain it, or pull out specific occurrences. There really isn’t a ‘paceline’. There isn’t a ‘leader’ and ‘guys following’. There is not much that is seemingly systematic about the movement of the pack. It is, by any definition, a peleton. But that’s really the only word you can use to describe it. To those new to it, it is complete chaos. You are constantly surrounded by skaters moving different speeds than you. Sometimes they are slower, sometimes faster. Sometimes you are moving towards the front, and sometimes moving back. A lot of this, is beyond your control'.

Aaron goes on to write 'There is certainly etiquette. The guys know what is safe and unsafe, and if you do the wrong thing, you will quickly know about it. The best guys can move from line to line easily, and when you have that kind of skill and confidence, you can ‘get in’. Some of that freedom comes with your skinsuit. The bigger teams get a lot more liberty with that kind of stuff. If you are an independent, well, not so much. The smaller pro teams find themselves somewhere in the middle. The same goes for your technique. If you come up the side with garbage technique, noone (not even your mom), will let you in. If you are known to leave gaps, it will be tough going. There is something of a system to it, and (forgive the phrasing, I just can’t help it) you’ve got to fight for your right to party. While it may seem that it is some sort of ‘boys club’ in the peleton, who gets in, who you let in and so on, but much of that it is correlated with real factors, and serves to keep the good guys from having bad traffic in front of them'.

Maybe I should just copy all of Aaron's report here. It's just that I like his reports so much, and I think that secretly, I wish I was the one writing them.


Links (Junker, Skatefan, & Skating Sisters): It's been a while since I've posted links, well, for the sake of putting them up; the first one is a skate shop in Germany- JunkerSkates.com Online-Shop.

The next link- Skatefan.nl is pretty sweet, and packed with news. It's too bad I can't read it. Well I sort of can; I can pick up skater names, I can decipher race and competition names, and that's about it. Oh, I can also appreciate the photos.

Since this site is very Netherlands focused, here's a link to report/ results from the house man and freezes winners rural of of the wheel job competition (that's what the AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation translates the headline from Dutch to English). I think it's actually Haulerwijk vd Wiel. Harm de Boer Fotografie has posted some pictures.


Haulerwijk vd Wiel- photo from Harm de Boer Fotografie

Haulerwijk vd Wiel- photo from Harm de Boer Fotografie
I am pretty sure I linked to Skating Sisters sometime in the past, but sometimes I play too much guitar and my memory goes away and doesn't work because I am heavily involved and immersed in the 'now' of my life. So just in case I haven't posted the link, but if I did post it before, it wont hurt to repost it, here once again or for the first time is the website Skating Sisters.


Skating with an umbrella probably somewhere in Europe- photo from Skating Sisters