Adrienne Schreiber curls down her lower lip to reveal “SF1” inked in black — a tattoo celebrating Scare Force One, a tribe of fierce Washington women on roller skates.
When they get together, they push, shove and — above all — win.
Bureaucrats, teachers and scientists, the women who compete in roller derby — a US game that is quickly gaining traction abroad — come from all walks of life.
Photo: AFP
However, to take part is not merely to don skates and score points.
On a recent Saturday afternoon in a sportsplex in Sterling, Virginia, a suburb of the US capital, the DC All-Stars A team — drawn from the area’s four teams, including Scare Force One — competed against the Vixens from Canada’s Rideau Valley Roller Girls league.
This is a full-contact sport with jostling, bumping and hitting — so long as it is not done with the elbows, forearm, hands, head or lower legs.
It is not for the faint of heart or spirit.
As each team of five races around the track, the “jammer” pushes ahead of the pack in an attempt to lap the other team’s players. After an initial pass, points are scored with each opposing player the jammer passes.
Team-themed tattoos and frequent injuries are common, as are tough personalities and derby pseudonyms. Condoleezza Slice and Nasty Pelosi — puns on the names of two of Washington’s most powerful women — play in the area.
The 31-year-old Schreiber — who last year opened Washington’s first-ever derby shop, Department of Skate — competes under the name Velocityraptor.
Roller derby, which got its start in 1930s Chicago, has had peaks and valleys of popularity, and a brief period in the 1970s full of theatrical stunts and storylines similar to those in professional wrestling.
“I think women really stuck with derby because it was an early sport where they were on the same track as men,” said James Vannurden, curator of the National Museum of Roller Skating in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), the governing body under which many teams operate, had just a couple dozen leagues when it began 10 years ago, all of them in the US.
Today, there are 243 full-member leagues, WFTDA public relations manager Kali Schumitz said.
The organization also has 101 apprentice leagues that are training to join the competition ranks.
And until just a few years ago, non-US teams were rare.
However, WFTDA leagues now exist in South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The Web site derbyroster.com counts 1,307 women’s flat-track leagues worldwide, from Mexico to Malaysia.
Sister Disaster, 38, plays on the Rideau Valley team from Ottawa, who beat Washington 180 to 165. Her real name is Lauren Hart.
“We travel a lot, by nature of being in Canada. There are fewer leagues for us to play there, so we have to come to the States,” she said.
Schumitz, a journalist who competes in Washington’s DC Rollergirls league under the name Lois Slain, said the sport is nevertheless expanding quickly overseas.
“Right now, most of our growth is outside the US. If you look at the makeup of the apprentice leagues, there’s a much higher percentage of non-US leagues,” she said.
In December, the sport’s second-ever World Cup will take place in Dallas, Texas, with 30 countries expected to participate.
Just 13 countries participated in the 2011 event, with the US dominating and Canada, England, Australia and Finland rounding out the top five.
Leading Team France will be Jessica Poingt, a 26-year-old who lives in Washington and skates for the DC Rollergirls under the name Dual Hitizen.
“I don’t really have the level for the whole US team — but for the French team, it’s so much fun to play with them and I love it — and there I have the level for it,” Poingt said.
For Yankee Scandal, a 35-year-old government fish biologist, “It’s just really fun to go out there and skate hard and hit people. There’s nothing like it.”
Scandal, whose real name is Holly Frank, stands patiently with pigtail braids and a human heart tattooed on her right bicep. Inked on its ventricles are the stars and stripes of Washington’s city flag, an homage to the DC All-Stars team for which she skates.
“Until my knees give out, I’ll keep doing this,” she said.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier