Inline Skating In Contemporary Sport

Inline skating in contemporary sport: 

An examination of its growth and development

Robert E. Rinehart

Copyright © 2013 by Robert E. Rinehart

Cover and book design by Paul Cowan

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author.

Inline skating in contemporary sport: An examination of its growth and development

Robert E. Rinehart

Department of Sport - Leisure Studies

University of Waikato

Hamilton 3240

New Zealand

Dedication

For ml

Acknowledgements

This is a project layered in ambiguity. The disjuncture between an oppositional cultural form like aggressive inline (yes, there are many other forms) and the main culture creates a dynamic that is at once exciting and daunting. It often creates an us versus them attitude, but I can assure any readers that there is more cooperation in accomplishments than there is conflict.

There are however many people who have, inadvertently or purposely, contributed to the making of this book, and I would like to thank them here for both their moral and tangible support (flat whites are tangible, right?):

Heather, Kim, Lisa, Mischa, Sally, Sharnae, Zenya at The Shack in Raglan. Great coffee, great atmosphere; Bobbi, Gabby, Matt, Michelle, Sharnae at Blacksand in Raglan; Ang, Kyra, Shelley, at "The Pub."

Paul Cowan has been instrumental in delivering my text to this electronic format. Without his steady efforts, this project would remain a dusty manuscript among others. For his efforts, I am exceedingly grateful. Additionally, I thank my doctoral students, who have provided me with inspiration throughout: Sarah Corner and Hamish Crocket, Tammy Crawford, Melissa Saul, Gemma Piercy. I am always appreciative of the commitment and wisdom of my colleagues and friends, in particular for this project Holly Thorpe, Doug Booth, Becky Beal, Chris Grenfell, Richard Pringle, Toni Bruce, Steve Leitchweiss, Paul Whitinui, Katie Fitzpatrick, Stephen May, Karen Barbour, Clive Pope. As always, some of the readers on my shoulder include Norman K. Denzin and Synthia Sydnor. I would like to thank Jayne Caudwell especially for her support throughout the writing of this book. As well, to the many inliners I have either met or spoken with, who have aided in the making of this book: I am grateful for your counsel.

I love New Zealand, and I thank my unnamed—and numerous—colleagues and co-conspirators from the University of Waikato, the University of Otago, and the community of Raglan who have, deliberately or purposely, assisted in the making of this book. Of course, for any errors in fact or interpretation, I assume full credit.

Proem

This banishment from action sports,

our. . . exile has really. . . been the greatest blessing.

—Arlo Eisenberg, in Barely Dead (2006)

Though it is said to have begun as an off-season training regimen for ice hockey players in Minnesota, inline skating (also known by skaters as Rollerblading®) itself has been embraced, both internationally and in the United States, mostly as a leisure and lifestyle activity. If you pause to think about inline skating in the 21st Century, what first comes to mind might be visions of beach boardwalks, of sunny and blue skies, and of the graceful, lyrical movements of the skaters. You may remember an impromptu inline roller hockey match, or seeing speedskaters Rollerblading® through the twenty-six miles of a marathon. Perhaps you attended an artistic inline figure skating competition, or watched ice skaters train on inline skates at the local roller skating rink. Or it might be that you were amazed at the aggressive inline competitions which media giants like ESPN (responsible for the X Games) and NBC (the Gravity Games) or non-sports’ related (or non-endemic, cf., doubleb, 2010) transnational corporations like Red Bull (e.g., the Red Bull Souk Run in Oman) or Sprite (Sprite Planet X Trials Series in Australia) have created and sponsored. But behind the various forms of athleticism, whether it is the grace and beauty or the power and speed of the movements, lie deeper historical, cultural, and technological formations and structures.

Sidebar: The Wikipedia Debate

Why does this matter? Knowing what happened before matters, if only so that we can see the patterns that tend to repeat themselves, and avoid complications in the future. Having a sense of history, for example, has made many surfers—albeit mostly white, male, middle-to-upper class, privileged surfers—more knowledgeable of surfing history and trends, and thus more able to resist corporate influence, co-optation (takeovers), and massification of their activity (e.g., Booth, 2011). (Or, if they embrace this kind of massification, they do so knowing some of the potential costs.)

But many inline skaters, from the most laid-back, recreational sampler to the most hard-core aggressive Rollerblader®, don’t know their history, or the trends of their activity, or technologies that affect inline, or what might constitute the major debates surrounding their kind of inline. As a result, they have less power in determining their individual and collective futures—they are effectively letting others (ironically, given the stances of inliners on independence) determine their fates.

Most recreational or fitness inline skaters would be surprised to know, for example, that the first recorded inline skate was designed around 1760, in Belgium! Or, as practitioners of aggressive (street or vert), they might not know how and why the number of ball bearings in their skates affects efficiency differently than the number user by an inline marathoner. Inline hockey players may not know that they have national and international organizations that determine rules and competitions—and how these organizations work to protect the skaters’ rights as athletes. Since many of the competitive skaters are youth (that is, minors), they often assume that they have no rights, or that their rights are solely controlled by their parents—and, of course knowledge, as Foucault has written, is power.

In the Funk - Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, 1993 version, as another example, there is no entry for inline skating, skating, or skate (other than a type of ray that lives in the sea), but there is a single entry for roller skating (Roller skating, 1993). Skateboarding is seen as a subset of roller skating, and there is no mention of skates with their wheels attached in a lined-up fashion! Within less than twenty years, inline, Rollerblading®, and other variants of inline skating vocabulary, have risen to common usage.

Michael Zaidman, former Director and Curator of the (U.S.) National Roller Skating Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, writes this about the variant forms of what inline skaters call their activity:

All Rollerblades are inline skates, but not all inline skates are Rollerblades. Rollerblade is a registered trademark of Rollerblade, Inc., but, like many groundbreaking products, the trade name has become synonymous with the type of product. Other examples of this include Q-Tip, Kleenex, Band-Aid, Frisbee, and Jacuzzi. You don't go Cadillacking, neither do you blade. Just like Calvin said, Verbing weirds language. Rollerblading ain't a word, although some people continue to use it. The people who work ar [sic] Rollerblade call it skating. (Zaidman, 2011)

Notwithstanding the logics of this argument, many people—including some top-notch aggressive Rollerbladers®—do call the activity Rollerblading, ‘blading, inline skating, and skating, among other more specific names.

This book, therefore, is an exploration of inline skating in its many cultural, popular, and political forms, from a variety of angles, deriving from both popular and scholarly points of view. It doesn’t proclaim to be an Ultimate Guide,—in an evolving, fluid field like extreme sports, it is rather foolhardy to think that there are truths for all time, much less ultimate knowledges. Thus, in a growing—and in some cases, oppositional and counter-cultural—field like inline skating, ongoing discussions substitute for definitive answers.

Ultimately, however, it is designed to be a discussion of empowerment through knowledge. Some of this knowledge and understanding comes from looking at YouTube or Vimeo videos, some comes from trends from other sports/activities, some from the very little that has been written about Rollerblading®. But, put together, many of these sources provide a more accurate analysis of the scene and current status of inlining than looking at them haphazardly.

There are popular culture sites everywhere that shout Rollerblade®. For example, in Venice Beach, California, Harry Perry, who moved to California from Michigan in 1973, is still singing, asking a specific priced donation for a photo, a t-shirt, and a music CD—and delivering his own brand of philosophical rhetoric to passing tourists:

Figure 1

He also does it all on Landroller® offset-wheeled inline skates, though he has used a variety of different brands through his nearly forty-year career. But the dominant brand for contemporary inline skates is Rollerblade®, and so everyone still refers to Perry’s Landrollers® as Rollerblades®! (He goes by the names Harry Perry, Har Nar Singh Khalsa, and Kama Kosmic Krusader (Harry Perry, 2011).)

The dominant, agreed-upon modern story¹ surrounding the beginnings of modern inline (circa 1980) points out that the skates themselves were designed to imitate ice skates and the use of them to emulate the action (and thus, produce similar skill and training effects) of an ice skater/hockey player during the non-winter months (cf., Spanberg, 1998; Brooker, 1998). This means, of course, that the initial intention for inline skating, as applied to the 20th Century, was as a form of what we now call cross training—mostly for ice hockey players whose use of the new skates was more movement-specific to hockey skating than was the propulsive movements of quad roller skaters.

Instead of cross-training by running, swimming, or playing basketball, ice hockey players could now continue to train—or simulate training—year-round, on concrete and asphalt roads. Of course, technological advancements were key to the rapid development of skating: for instance, the invention of polyurethane polymers (for other purposes than skate wheels), begun in 1937 by Otto Bayer in Germany, by the 1980s allowed skaters with polyurethane wheels to ride over small obstructions in the road rather than coming to a jarring stop—allowed simply because the wheels were polyurethane and not metal.

During the 1980s, roller skating on fours wheels (quad) was a very different experience from the singular line, sweep, and styles of outward pushing that ice-and inline skate(r)s required. Also, most young, male, team-sport-oriented hockey players typically saw quad roller skating as uncool, perhaps effeminate, and childish. (As Rollerblading® soared in popularity, ironically, many skateboarders attacked it publicly—in this book, we will explore some of the reasons why—on just these grounds.)

In the 1980s, Rollerblading® was, the story continues, first designed as a sport form. In fact, the Olsons’ designs were modelled after hockey ice skates, for inline, dry land hockey. The crossovers of skating forms is demonstrated in the following on-line blog:

Blades first ended up on my feet when i [sic] was in second grade. I started off playing roller hockey. I played for a few seasons in the kids’ league, then got moved up to the adult league. Seemed like hockey was about to take my life over. But around fifth grade my brother and some of his friends were introduced to the idea of grinding curbs and riding raps. Arlo, Brooke Howard and Chris Edwards were such big icons at the time! It’s cliche, but those were the days when rollerblading was all over TV. NISS events and ASAs both were televised. So they simply saw that, and looked into it a bit, and found a little cult just brewing. I was then Introduced [sic] to The Hoax, Dare to Air, Baking Cookies, Mr Moosenuckle, and the video that I could not get enough of, Harvesting the Crust. I continued to play hockey into my fifth grade year, but after being benched for having a bad attudude [sic] and not being a team player, i [sic] decided that I was done with coaches and people telling me what I could and couldn’t do. And since that day, I’ve been free, doing my thing. Best decision of my life… so far. (Glowicki, 2010)

The cool factor of aggressive inline, the drudgery of adult-run inline roller hockey, and a rejection of youth sport coaching, guidance, and organization: these are some of the key themes that run throughout Glowicki’s (and other youths’) stories regarding their involvement in some primary forms of inline—and, indeed, in their rejection of most mainstream sport.

But inline is also an excellent form of exercise, and a healthful movement form. Both aerobic and anaerobic—long and sustained in the presence of oxygen, or fast and quick without sustainable oxygen supplies, respectively—and imitating the leg mechanics of locomotion in ice skating, inline (especially aggressive) was viewed (in the beginning) as masculine and strenuous and physical. In short, it exemplified all the requirements of what it meant to be a sport, and the people who were trying to promote it generally had no problem with aligning it with sport. But it wasn’t necessarily received that way, not when it first hit the public’s consciousness.

Early inline forms

In the eighteenth century, in European and Scandinavian lands much like Minnesota, ice skates were used as forms of quick and accessible transportation across vast amounts of frozen bodies of water, and sometimes across frozen-over roads and pathways. It seemed logical, then, that this type of transport and locomotion would be translated to non-winter months, and non-icy surfaces, by means of some sort of device attached to the feet. The pursuit of a dry-land skate that would allow skaters to emulate the movements of ice skaters was logical, and a natural for the topography of the regions.

Of course, we can trace the concept of skating—that is, gliding across surfaces, mostly ice, on the feet—etymologically. The Dutch, using the word skeates (ice skates) around the 1660s, took that word from the Middle Dutch word schaetse, from the Old North French escache, meaning a stilt, trestle, which derived from Old French eschace, meaning stilt (Harper, 2001-2010). Clearly, the concept of standing upon stilts and moving forward upon those stilts in a sliding, gliding, rhythmic way came from the combination of stilts on dry land and the giving, melting surface of ice (as opposed to the ungiving, solid surface of asphalt or concrete).

Everyone in cold country has intentionally or unintentionally slipped and slided on ice—especially as a child. Sliding and gliding on ice atop some sort of framework—which early on was reduced to very close to the ground—now helped the skater to control their slide: to not fall, but rather to intentionally glide and turn and actually move with intent. But the dry ground surface creates more friction than does ice; the question became, how to translate the ice skate platform to a stilt for dry land skating?

At any rate, it took over two hundred years to solve some of the problems of the inline, non-ice-related, skate, including how to stop, how to maneuver, and how to glide safely without sudden, unpredictable stops. How to attach the skate shoe to the foot was another logistical problem for skate inventors and innovators. In short, the main problem was one of devising a skate platform that would enhance the skater’s control over his or her movement rather than add to the awkwardness.

Of course, not until the mid-20th Century did anyone worry about whether inline was successful or not: people simply did it, either as a novelty of the wealthy or because solving the puzzle of how to skate on a non-melting, higher-frictioned surface was an interesting