Falling in Line

So, Olympic speedskater Derek Parra, where in the Midwest did you grow up? Where, when you were 5, did you open your Christmas skates, then rush off to try them, skating till it was way past dark? Waukesha, Wis.? White Bear Lake, Minn.? Northbrook, Ill.? What’s that, you say? San Bernardino? As in California? And you never had ice skates as a kid? You had inline roller skates as a teenager, which is getting to be longer ago than you care to remember?

OK, let’s see if we can get this all straight. You’re about a month shy of turning 32, you’re 5 feet 4, from Southern California, you took up speedskating when you were 25 and you think you can win an Olympic medal. That about it?

All true, you say, but the order is cockeyed? It’s the Olympic medal that’s important and all the rest is, well, all the rest.

“An Olympic medal, that’s why I’m in speedskating,” Parra says. “It’s the only reason.

“I’d won 18 [gold medals] in inline skating. I’d set two world records. I was overall world champion twice. I was leading medalist in the Pan American Games in Argentina, and that’s the second-biggest event to the Olympic Games. When I started roller skating, we were always told, ‘It’ll be in the Olympics. It’ll be in the Olympics.’ I waited and waited but it never came.”

Speedskating was firmly ensconced in the Games, though, and other inliners, notably Jennifer Rodriguez and KC Boutiette, had already made the transition. They suggested Parra might want to follow in their blade tracks.

“It took me a couple of years to transfer over but I finally did,” he says. “I think I was on the ice for two weeks and I skated nationals and was second in two distances, the 5K and the 10K. At that point I said, ‘Hey, I believe this is possible.’”

Possible, but not easy. Parra’s early success was followed by a couple of seasons of learning how to skate on ice.

“They may look the same, but [inline skating and speedskating] are definitely different,” Parra says. “I had to really forget everything I learned in inline skating. I pretty much had to start from scratch. I didn’t excel as fast as I wanted to....

“On inline skates, when your skate lands, you’ve got friction immediately. You’ve got grip. On the ice, you’ve got a flat blade that’s only sharp on the edges. If you land on your flat, you’ll slide. If you land on your edge, you’ll grip. You land on your inner edge and you push off your inner edge.

“When I first started, I was [landing flat] and pushing, like, squeak, squeak, squeak. You could actually hear me all the way around the oval in my sprints. It was embarrassing. But I had to learn to be really patient and get all my power in one spot, where you’re supposed to push.

“That’s the beauty of speedskating, the fast push in the right spot. You could see me really working, going as hard as I could, and not getting anywhere. So I actually had to learn how to skate.”

But he did learn, and, in a sport that rewards athletes long of leg and thick of thigh, he is deadly serious about that medal. Parra will race the 1,500- and 5,000-meter races in the Games, the shorter race offering him his best shot. He won a World Cup 1,500 at The Hague in November and is second in the season standings.

He might also have qualified for the 1,000 but, just before Olympic trials, chose to fly from Salt Lake City to Orlando, Fla., to be with his wife, Tiffany, for the birth of their first child, Mia Elizabeth. Tiffany had been staying in Orlando with her mother while Derek was doing his Olympic training. He got back in time to skate the 1,000 but was exhausted from the travel, emotionally drained by the birthing experience and unprepared for competition.

“I was just hoping to make it through,” he said after the first of the two qualifying races.

Being unprepared for competition is hardly Parra’s normal style. Besides his daily skating workouts, he follows a rigorous four-hour off-ice training routine that includes 32 drills, one of them a series of jumps while wearing a 40-pound vest. Conditioning and technique help make up for his slight stature--he weighs 140 pounds, only slightly more than one of Eric Heiden’s thighs during Heiden’s five-gold-medal performance at Lake Placid in 1980. Besides, Parra says, size isn’t everything.

“The fastest guy in the world right now is a Japanese skater in the 500-meter, [1998 Olympic winner] Hiroyasu Shimizu,” he points out. “He’s 5-4. He’s a little heavier than I am, but he’s very fast and has technical skills. He’s OK because he can get off the line quicker, with higher foot speed. But for the longer races, you’ve got a longer recovery [between strides] and you can have a longer glide.

“The recovery starts when your leg lifts off the ice and comes around before it lands again. [Because of that] the taller skaters do really well in the distances. If you’re smaller, you have to be technically perfect to go as fast as somebody who might not be so technically perfect but is bigger and stronger.”

Salt Lake City will be Parra’s second Olympic experience and he’s hoping it will be more rewarding than the first. Only two years into speedskating, he made the U.S. team that went to Nagano and thought he would be skating in the 5,000 as an alternate. Instead, he was bumped. A classification error was discovered on Kazakhstan’s entry forms and when that skater was moved back into the 5,000, where he belonged, there was no spot available for Parra.

“My family had all come at the last minute, just two days before, and now I wasn’t even going to race,” he says. “It was probably one of the toughest moments of my career.”

This time around, Parra is a six-year veteran, is vastly more familiar with the races he is skating, and has high hopes. If he should win a gold medal?

“For me, that would be one way to say thank you to everybody who’s ever believed in me, or who’s ever helped me, kind of paved the way for me to have success. Friends, family members. Holding up that medal and being on that podium would be a great way of just saying, ‘Guys, thanks for believing in me, and I love you.’”