Short Track Speed Skating

The international short-track speed-skating circuit has its share of glamour and exoticism, but that doesn't make it any easier to enjoy if you intensely dislike flying.

Thankfully for Canadian women's team ace Kalyna Roberge - for whom it's an ordeal to travel to races in far-flung places such as China - the upcoming 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics are a comparatively short five-hour jaunt from home.

The 23-year-old student from St-Étienne-de-Lauzon, Que., a hamlet in the farmland south of Quebec City, won a silver medal at the 2006 Turin Olympics as a 19-year-old, and is determined to better the feat in British Columbia in February.

Not that she's allowing herself to look too far ahead.

"The Games are still a long way away, there's a lot of work to do before then," the soft-spoken Roberge said after a training session at Montreal's Maurice Richard Arena earlier this autumn.

Roberge stands a pixyish 5 foot 2 and is a retiring type away from the arena. In a sport of edgy iconoclasts, she's partial to the quiet life and country music. But outward appearances belie her fierceness as a competitor.

She is a deceptively powerful skater, known for her explosive passing - which she displayed at a World Cup event in South Korea last September, winning a bronze medal in the 500-metre final despite being hampered by an injury flare-up.

As veteran Canadian skater Tania Vicent said of her teammate after the 2006 Olympic relay final - where Roberge was the youngest woman on the squad but nevertheless twice powered it to second place from third over the 27-lap, 3,000-metre race - Roberge's opposition actually seemed to fear her.

Though Roberge clearly remains one of the dominant sprint skaters in women's short track, the fear may have dissipated a little.

Her Olympic preparations have been a fraught business as she tries to recover from a series of hip and back injuries that limited her to a handful of races last season.

At a 500-metre race in China in September - she will likely race both the 500 and 1,000 in Vancouver - Roberge felt a twinge but was able to recover in time for South Korea the following week.

"I still feel some effects and sometimes there's pain, but it's manageable. I've been skating with weighted tights to try and help it along and keep me in position," she said just a few days before the flare-up.

The good news is Roberge and the rest of the Canadian team will have until Nov. 5 to rest their aches - that's when the World Cup circuit lands in Montreal for the first of two final tune-ups (the last is in Marquette, Mich., a week later).

"It will be an opportunity to do some scouting of the competition. I spend a fair bit of time analyzing and visualizing what it is the others are doing," she said.

The hometown race, in particular, will also be a good barometer of Roberge's fitness - she and the team are on a training schedule with the goal of seeing them peak in February.

The upcoming events are of weightier importance than the two Asian races - where the final seeding for the Olympics will be decided - and Canada is aiming to qualify for the maximum three spots allowed at each distance.

Until then, it's a safe bet Roberge will spend her spare moments in St-Étienne-de-Lauzon, where her family and boyfriend live - the pair are clearing land for a horse farm they hope to open after the 2010 Olympics.

Roberge freely admits she doesn't like being far from home. It was one thing to fly to a Canadian championship in Prince George or to an event in Wisconsin when she began her career. But it was another thing to fly to her first international World Cup in Beijing - the 2004 world junior championships.

It's just in her nature to want to be in control, which may explain her strong antipathy toward flying. Roberge is the youngest of four children - the rest of them boys - who started out figure skating because speed-skating programs did not exist in their community of 15,000.

But as soon as one did start, the Roberge brothers signed up, and their little sister soon followed, dropping a sport she thought far too feminine for her bold, aggressive bent.

Although Roberge confesses she was far from comfortable on that flight to Beijing, she quickly asserted herself on the ice.

"It didn't matter who it was," she said in a recent interview. "It was just a bunch of girls. I was going to pass them on the inside, pass them on the outside.

"I didn't necessarily think the race through," she continued. "Now that I've matured, and have a few more years under my belt, I've had a chance to think about race strategy."

Roberge's greatest challenge at the 2010 Games will defeating China's Wang Meng, an Olympic champion at both Salt Lake in 2002 and Turin.
However, Canadian women's short-track coach Sébastien Cros believes Wang is a long way from invincible.

"I think it's difficult to beat this girl all through the year," he said. "But one time, at the right time, I think it's possible. And I think Kalyna has the potential to beat this girl."