They skated to honour their club founder while amassing an amazing 20 personal best times Saturday at Kal Tire Place.
The Vernon Vortex Speed Skating club hosted the Interior Okanagan Short Track FUNale with almost 60 skaters representing six area teams. The event started off with a 1.000-metre memorial skate for club founder and teammate Peter Blokker, who died last month at age 84 while on his way to Italy for the World Masters.
Dozens of skaters took part, skating to Peter’s favorite song, the theme from Chariots of Fire.
The eight Vortex skaters posted impressive results with Lauren Millar, Sam McDicken, Will McDicken and Russel Dow leading the pack with four out of four personal bests.
Tova Dow and Nathan Stewart each had two PBs and Charlie McGinty had a single. Newcomer Zolie Ozero had an amazing first showing for the club.
The Vortex sent three members to Quebec City to take on the best long track skaters at the Canadian Age Class Speed Skating Championships last weekend.
The team had a horrendous start to the competition with travel delays due to weather. It took them 31 hours to complete the trip which left them exhausted from travel when the intent was to arrive early, get in an easy practice the day before and arrive at the competition after a good night’s rest.
As expected, there were no “easy heats” in a Canadian championship. Daniel Hall and Nate Benn both managed to reach the A final in the opening 300-m. Laura Hall, not known as a sprint specialist, made it into the B final.
Benn narrowly missed the bronze medal in the 300 final, finishing fourth, just point two seconds off the podium. The 500 event also resulted in agonizingly close finishes with Daniel Hall and Benn each placing fifth in their age divisions, Daniel .02 hundredths of a second off the podium and Nate .05 out of the medals.
Daniel earned the bronze medal in a photo-finish 1,500. There was .07/hundredths of a second separating the bronze medal from fifth place. Laura finished seventh in the 500,
Benn skated a valiant 1,500, taking seventh in the race but leading the majority of it. After about 500-m, an opposing skaters crashed in the middle of the pack and Benn took off like a shot, grabbing a 15-m lead almost instantly. With 400-m to go, his lead shrank to 10-m with the pack working together to chase him down.
In the 3,000-m, Daniel skated a tactically awesome race, drawing on his short track racing background to place second.
Laura Hall took the lead in the 3,000-m early and set a rapid pace but with the wind conditions was not able to gain any separation from the pack and ended up eighth as the pack was able to draft for the majority of the race and beat her in a sprint finish. Laura anchored the silver-medalist B.C. Team in the team pursuit event, leading the majority of it.