Skaters from states throughout the West glided and gathered at The Cube recently to compete in the Western States Regional Speed Skating Championships.
With 30 skaters qualifying, including three of Santa Clarita’s very own team, Santa Clarita Speed Skating Club President Ron Halcrow, who founded the club in 2004, discussed its legacy.
“We’ve produced an Olympian, three World Team members, nine national champions, 11 Western Regional champions and 26 state champions,” Halcrow said. “The speed skaters who competed [on June 28] came from Oregon, northern and southern California, Arizona; usually we have skaters who come from Colorado and Utah, but they didn’t come this year.”
Halcrow, who is an Illinois native, said his own trajectory as a speed skater dates back decades.
“I grew up in Illinois, and I skated in the 1960s. I was a national champion myself and in the Olympic trials back in 1967. I grew up with a very famous speed skating family, and they produced a daughter by the name of Bonnie Blair who became decorated as one of the top female Olympians of all time,” Halcrow said.
With years of skating experience under his belt, Halcrow said times have changed the nature of the sport, especially in California.
“It’s much more difficult to practice in California because of our temperature. In Illinois, we used to wait until the lakes froze, and then we’d go out and we’d skate. And so in the Midwest, the kids, the athletes have much, have a big advantage living in the Midwest. Because of that, they can practice for free,” Halcrow said. “In Santa Clarita, we used to skate maybe for an hour and a half twice a week. Now, we skate once a week for one hour. So we have kind of transitioned from being a competitive program to a recreational program.”
With an hour of skating costing hundreds of dollars, that hasn’t stopped the competitors on the team from winning their respective divisions.
The three competitors who won the Western States Regional Championships for the 2024-2025 season, who range from 14 to 75 years of age, were: Alex Khuong-Gagnon, 14, Mark Jeter and Robert Allison.
While practicing may not be as accessible or affordable as one would like, the benefit of short-track speed skating is that any competitor at any age has an advantage.
“You have to be very agile to do that sport. So the skaters who have an advantage in short track speed skating need to be very, very small and agile to skate those tracks effectively. So the type of skate athlete who excels at the sport is usually an athlete who’s too small to play football, too small to play basketball, possibly too small, really, to play baseball, but very fit,” Halcrow said. “It’s a fun sport. The fact that we have a 75-year-old skating tells you that it’s not that hard on the body.”
