Carson Teen on Fast--and Short--Track to Olympics

When Maria Garcia tells classmates at Palisades Charter High she’s a speedskater, they usually stare in disbelief.

“Most people think it’s a sport [based] in the East or the Midwest,” she said. “People look at me and say, ‘Huh?’ If they’ve heard of speedskating, they think of long track and Bonnie Blair, and I have to go through the whole process of explaining what short track is.”

After listing the differences--short-track skaters race each other on a 111-meter, curved track; long-track skaters race the clock on a 400-meter track with long straightaways--Garcia can brag: She’s the U.S. women’s junior champion and the 16th-ranked junior short-track skater in the world, making her a candidate to represent the United States at the 2002 Olympics.

Bored with figure skating, Garcia tried speedskating but dropped it because her feet hurt. She went back to figure skating but didn’t stay long and tried speedskating again in 1996. Fitted with skates and equipment through a program funded by the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, Garcia found her niche.

The 15-year-old Carson resident progressed rapidly through age-group competitions. Although she’s among the youngest junior competitors, she won the 500, 1,000 and 1,500 at the U.S. junior short-track championships last month in Bay City, Mich. Three weeks ago, she barely missed qualifying for the ladies’ 500-meter finals in the world junior short-track championships in Warsaw, Poland, her first overseas trip. She was second in her semifinal when she fell.

“It was frustrating because it was the last corner,” said Garcia, who skates at Glacial Gardens in Lakewood and HealthSouth training center in El Segundo. “It would have made a big difference in the rankings if I had qualified for the final. But it was really exciting.”

Southern California isn’t known as a speedskating mecca but might soon earn that reputation. The Southern California Speedskating Assn. has produced one Olympian, and Garcia is among several potential Olympians in the pipeline.

Rusty Smith of Sunset Beach made the 1998 Nagano Olympic team and finished 22nd in the 500 meters, 13th in the 1,000 and sixth in the 5,000-meter relay. Amber Holt of Torrance, a long-track skater, was ranked seventh among U.S. sprinters after the national long-track sprint trials in Milwaukee. Ten local kids won national age-group titles last year, setting five national records.

It all began in 1989, when a group of speedskaters decided to revive a sport that once thrived here. Sue Perles, a certified coach, got a grant from the AAF to outfit kids with skates, helmets and pads.

“Ice sports, almost by definition, are expensive, and we wanted to make speedskating available to low- and moderate-income kids,” said Perles, a volunteer program director for the AAF. “Some, like Maria, skate all the time. Others come three or four times, and other times of the year, they do other sports. There’s a significant core of children who have decided they want to pursue this. . . . If a sport is fun and you give a child a good opportunity to do it, some are going to excel.”

The program got a boost when Wilma Boomstra, who coached at the Olympic Educational Center in Marquette, Mich., moved to California with her musician husband and became the program’s head coach. Its capital has come from additional grants from the AAF--which was funded with profits from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics--as well as corporate sponsors and parents’ fund-raisers.

Aspiring Olympians can try speedskating at three weekly sessions in Lakewood, home of the Ice Club DeMorra, founded by Dutch immigrants and one of the country’s oldest speedskating clubs. There’s also a session every Sunday at El Segundo, home of the HealthSouth Speedskating club. Skate rental is free, but kids get priority over adults. More information is available at https://socalspeedskating.org or https://healthsouth.iworp.com.

Garcia didn’t see much of the Nagano speedskating competition. “They showed only 10 minutes on TV,” she said. But she hopes to see it up close in Salt Lake City. “That’s my big-time goal, to make it to the Olympics,” said Garcia, who spent last week at an elite relay camp in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “I think I have a good chance of making the Olympic team in 2002. I’ll go to the trials and see how I measure up.”

RED, WHITE AND BLUE--AND GREENE

Maurice Greene, the world-record holder in the 100 (9.79) and Sydney gold medalist (9.87), is known as the world’s fastest man. Greene, Jon Drummond, Bernard Williams and Brian Lewis also became known as stereotypical ugly Americans at the Sydney Games for preening, posing and using the flag as a fashion accessory after they won the 400-meter relay.

Greene, who stuck out his tongue at TV cameras as he got his relay medal, said people he has met since Sydney have told him “I shouldn’t worry because they didn’t see anything wrong.” However, he acknowledged euphoria is no excuse for being disrespectful.

“Obviously, there are some people we did offend and I apologize,” he said last week. “At the time, we were so overjoyed we didn’t think anyone would be offended. All we can do is apologize.”

Greene will run the 50 in the Powerade Indoor track and field championships Feb. 11 at Staples Center, his only indoor meet this season. His time of 5.56 at the L.A. Invitational two years ago is the U.S. record but hasn’t been certified by the International Amateur Athletic Federation as equal to Donovan Bailey’s world record because postrace drug tests weren’t administered.

Greene, who lives in the San Fernando Valley, donated $5,000 to buy tickets for kids to attend the meet. “That’s what we need to do--give something to inner-city kids and give them something positive to look at,” he said. Raising the profile of track and field locally is also important to him. “The main thing that needs to be done is to give us a stage to perform on and let people see us perform as much as possible,” he said. “We have the greatest athletes in America, but we need to go to Europe to do it.”

Greene, in training for a month and a half after his busy post-Olympic appearance schedule, hasn’t decided if he will run the 100, 200 or both at the U.S. championships in June. But he’s sure he can better his 100 time. “I have a goal of 9.76,” he said. “My coach [John Smith] believes I can go 9.6, so we’ll see what happens.”

DON’T JUMP FOR JOY

Here’s a bad idea: the International Skating Union will hold a jumping competition for Olympic-eligible figure skaters March 3-4 at Lyon, France.

Eight men and eight women will be invited to compete for a prize of $20,000 for each gender. Competitors will perform seven levels of jumps, ranging from a triple salchow to a quadruple-triple combination for men, and a triple toe loop to a triple axel for women. Jumps will be judged on a scale of 0 to 4.

A jumping contest is the last thing the ISU should promote. Haven’t enough elite skaters suffered stress-related leg and back injuries as they try to add tougher jumps to their repertoires?

The mediocre performances in the men’s final at last week’s U.S. championships can be blamed in part on injuries that hampered Michael Weiss (broken foot) and men’s winner Timothy Goebel (strained knee). The women’s field lost Naomi Nari Nam and Deanna Stellato to hip injuries and Sasha Cohen because of a broken vertebra, and champion Michelle Kwan reduced the difficulty of her triple-triple combination because of a sore back. Elvis Stojko of Canada, one of the world’s most dynamic skaters, has been plagued by a succession of leg injuries and might miss the world championships.

Why put more emphasis on jumping, even for one competition?

HERE AND THERE

The nationalities of judges at the European figure skating championships in Bratislava, Slovakia, weren’t listed on score sheets or the scoreboard. That was supposed to protect them from charges they vote on national bias. . . . Goebel and Kwan will skip the Four Continents competition Feb. 7-10 at Salt Lake City to prepare for the Grand Prix final in Tokyo Feb. 15-18. . . . Evegeni Plushenko’s victory over Russian compatriot Alexei Yagudin at the European championships was his second in three head-to-head meetings. Plushenko defeated him at the Russian national championships but lost to him in the Japan Open early this month.

Canadian figure skating officials will hold a spot at the world championships for Stojko, who missed the national championships because of a knee injury. The other berth will go to Canadian champion Emanuel Sandhu, who did a quadruple toe loop-triple toe loop combination and a triple axel-triple toe loop in his triumphant long program last week.

Inger Miller and Mark Crear withdrew from the Powerade meet because injuries prevented them from getting fit. Crear had knee surgery after winning bronze in the high hurdles at Sydney and Miller hasn’t regained peak form after a hamstring injury caused her to pull out of the 100, 200 and 400-meter relay at Sydney. . . . European 100-meter record holder Christine Arron of France moved to California to train in Westwood with Greene’s coach, Smith, who also works with Miller and Ato Boldon.

The Canadian Press asked four of its hockey writers to list their top eight picks for the Canadian men’s 2002 Olympic team. Mario Lemieux, Rob Blake, Chris Pronger, Joe Sakic, Scott Niedermayer, Martin Brodeur, Paul Kariya and Theo Fleury got the most votes; Eric Lindros, who hasn’t played this season, was last among the 23.

Only 376 days until the Salt Lake City Winter Games.