|
Worldwide Skating Links USA and Canada. The 8-kilometer Rideau Canal in Ottawa, Canada is the largest expanse of maintained natural ice in North America, because it's so wide: up to 100 meters in places. Sylvan Lake, Alberta has a 10-kilometer track, Joliette, Québec (northeast of Montréal) has a 9-kilometer track, and Ste-Marguerite, Québec (northwest of Montréal) has a 7-kilometer track. South of the border, the Northeast Speedskating Association, Montshire Speedskating Club and Green Mountain Speedskating Club sites cover the New England speedskating scene. The New England Ice Yacht Association has reports on natural ice conditions in the northeast US. Visit SkateNY for information about rinks in New York City and beyond. The Southern California Speed Skating Association has an excellent photo guide to long-track and short-track speedskating. NordicSkater.com and Skating.com have links to inline and ice skating clubs and equipment manufacturers worldwide. Sweden and Finland. Sweden is a popular destination for recreational skating, with some of the best natural ice in the world. The skating season on Sweden's lakes sometimes lasts five months, from November through April. Visit the Karlstad, Linköping, Stockholm, Västerås and Västerort skating club sites, and take a look at this directory of Swedish skating clubs. Vikingarännet is an 80-kilometer race and tour between Uppsala and Stockholm. Eight thousand skaters typically show up for this one-day event held in late January or early February. Here's a first-person report on Vikingarännet and on Swedish recreational skating. The Finland Ice Marathon is held every winter at the end of February on Lake Kallavesi in Kuopio, Finland. The city of Oulu also holds an annual skating marathon. Netherlands and Austria. When there's good ice in the Netherlands, recreational skating is extremely popular, with nearly 200 official tour routes, each attracting thousands of skaters. Read this description of a typical Dutch tour. The most famous tour is the Elfstedentocht (Eleven Cities Tour), a 200-kilometer circuit over the interconnected canals, rivers and lakes of Friesland province. If you speak Dutch, visit Berthon Rikken's and Johan Grootveld's sites for more information. If you don't speak Dutch, Johan has translated some of his tour descriptions into English. Dutch ice conditions are unpredictable, and tour dates are announced on short notice. The best information sources are NOS-teletekst, the Dutch national skating organization KNSB (Koninklijke Nederlandsche Schaatsenrijders Bond), and the Dutch Marathon Skating site. And if the Dutch winter fails to deliver on its promise, Dutch skaters migrate to the Austrian Alps for a week-long series of tours and races on a mountain lake called the Weissensee. The series culminates at the end of January with the 200-kilometer "Alternatieve Elfstedentocht." |