Top 5 Reasons Hong Kong needs a Roller Derby League

So, I spent Christmas and New Years in Hong Kong, where I got to meet up with Colonel Slanders (and we had yum cha! Nom nom). Before I went, I looked up places to skate around there or leagues to skate with. THERE AREN'T ANY. WAT. I'd love to see a Honkers team at some future Blood and Thunder World Cup, but that doesn't look like it is going to happen. There seems to be some demand for derby though: check out the most recent posts in the Hong Kong Pro Roller-Skating Team Facebook page. Anyway, after being there, here are some reasons why Honkers needs to have a derby league, if it wasn't already obvious that anywhere without a derby league ought to have one:

5. The market exists for it already

LOLWUT

Hong Kong makes roller skates. Yep. Granted, some of the skates they make are pretty hilariously terrible but they have the resources to make good quality derby skates. So why don't they? I guess it's not that hard to get cheap materials and stuff, and while they're at it they could also make safety gear. They need safety gear for other forms of skate-related sports, so obviously there is a market for that sort of thing.

They also have a LOT of people who skate, but on ice or speed skate or artistic roller skating, which I gather is like figure skating but on quads. But they're pretty good at it. Because there aren't a lot of sports fields and stuff, people tend to do indoor sports like ice skating and this kind of thing, and then add to that the whole Chinese stereotype about overachievement and you have an army of skaters with mad skills. Seriously, check out this kid. I don't even know how old she is but HOLY CRAP:

What was that?! I mean, backwards crossovers, backwards shoot the duck, jumping transitions?!?! I really hate her skates, but mad props to her for being able to do all that on crazy crappy skates. I learned how to shoot the duck (forwards) when I was like 8, but then I forgot and didn't relearn it until last year or something. But imagine pulling those moves in a jam. Jesus. The best I would be able to do if I was jamming against this kid is maybe hipcheck her in the ribcage before she pirouetted away from me and did 10 million transitions while jumping the apex or something. I should just retire now.

4. Lots of flat spots

So much surface area.

Don't get me wrong. Hong Kong Island is pretty much a giant rock with some houses and stuff along the shoreline. That would make a freaking awesome hill skate, but I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is the large number of flat (and usually very nicely paved) surfaces that are around: basketball courts, subway tunnels, and, most of all, shopping malls. Yes. Given the stupid number of shopping malls there are (and how they all have nice atriums and escalators) it's amazing that people still walk to get places, when they could skate between the shops.

I walked around in a lot of malls while I was there, and a lot of the time I was looking at the ground and thinking "this would be a really nice surface to skate on". They're mostly tiled (and very well polished) so you'd probably need to use grippier wheels, but there is SO much flat space, all packed one floor on top of another. You could do like a race or something and start at the top of a building and do a lap of each floor, going down the escalator in between (or if you are game, running down the stairs on your toe stops). Now THAT would be a fun game. But seriously, there are so many atrium-type things and stuff that I'm surprised nobody's actually done that yet.

Also, Hong Kong airport is a HUGE expanse of flat. I almost wish I packed my skates just to go there. It's fricking huge and wide enough that you could skate around all the check in counters and people and luggage with room to spare. There's also the old Honkers airport in Kai Tak, which apparently still has all the runways and everything there (and which used to be one of three places in the world where pilots had to manually land the plane because the flight path was in between people's apartment buildings...!!) which might have been interesting to explore on outdoor wheels. But failing that, the new airport is also pretty awesomesauce.

So flat. So shiny.

3. Passive-Aggressiveness
One thing I found about people in Honkers was that they were SO polite. But, as my mother will tell you, behind all that politeness is some pent-up bitchiness waiting to explode in the right situation. I was at a street food stand once and one girl spazzed out and yelled at the vendor lady because she had to wait for TWO WHOLE MINUTES to get her cheese weiners on a stick. So she was like "hurry up, I'll miss my bus" and the vendor lady said "I have to cook these properly" and then the girl was all like "YOU'RE TAKING AGES TO COOK THEM BECAUSE YOU KEEP PUTTING RAW THINGS INTO THE BOILER!" and then the vendor lady was like "I THINK I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING" and then they were yelling at each other in the street about food poisoning and child abuse and everyone was staring and I was confused and wanted my egg waffles.

So normally it doesn't boil over and people are good at keeping their tempers in check, but when it gets to be too much, look out. Where better to let that out all that aggression in a safe environment than in derby? Oh, and I guess making a smashed cucumber salad comes a close second. It's not as fun as derby, but it tastes a hell of a lot better.

2. The Squat Toilet
Oh yes, it's hard to go on a trip to Honkers without coming across one of these bad boys:

Those foot ridges are not helpful for keeping your balance if the toilet is wet.

I never figured out whether you face forwards or backwards on these things. Basically you do a squat to when you pee or take a dump. Protip: for the love of Derby Jesus roll up the bottoms of your pants BEFORE you go into the bathroom stall. Anyway, basically you bend your knees to below a 90-degree angle, drop your butt (not so it touches the toilet, ew) and then do your business.

Sound familiar? Hello, derby stance!

There was a LOT of practice of this. Also, even the normal sit-down toilets were usually grody, so it was good practice to hover-squat over those. End result: beefy calf and lower back muscles and an ability to hold a stupidly low derby stance for a very long time. (Actually this is kind of important when you are being thrown in front of other skaters as a cannonball, or to just be low enough to not to get hit in scrimmage.)

Random sidenote: Apparently flat-footed squatting is something that comes more naturally to Asians or something. I'm not sure why, but I heard something about how the leg bones or ankle bones or something in Asians made the more able to do the flat-footed squat. I tried to find some scientific evidence of this online but this was as good as I got:

So we did a test – 100% of the Asians could squat with feet on the ground (P<0.000063) while only 13.5% of North Americans could (p<0.0000043). And of the 13.5%, 9% had part ASIAN ancestry in them. The remaining one was a Yoga Freak.

I'm not sure what the sample size was, but this sounds about right from my experience with people in derby. It still sounds weird (and possibly racist?) to say that Asians are the only people capable of the flat-footed squat. In my opinon, I think it has something to do with having longer calf muscles or something, but I'm not a scientist. But I'm sure Dr. Chang-Goldstein (in the video on the right) is!



1. Ridiculous number of people on the street = one giant pack
Seriously. The population density in Honkers is something like 6,500 people per square km, which makes it the 4th most packed place on Earth. Compare that to Australia's population density, which is closer to 3 whole people/square km. No wonder there are like bazillions of people everywhere you look. And they're slow too. They tend to mosey around, stop and look at random things in shops or not really look where they're going (usually because they are on a cellphone or PSP or some other device) and all up get in your way.

Spot the lead jammer.

Also, then there are the CHILDREN. For some reason that escapes me, people in Honkers like to have their children in tow and use them like small, moveable barriers to hold up people trying to get around them. The annoying thing is that, in a crowd 5+ people deep, you can't see the kids. So it looks like there's an opening and you go for it, and then suddenly you are plowing into a group of children and their families, all of whom are walking at like 1km/hour. There is usually a line of them holding hands or something, and some of them are so small I can jump over them. Heh.

I found it a really fun challenge to make it through a crowd without touching any of them (not like that, you perverts). Like, weaving my way around people, finding gaps that I could squeeze through while throngs of people milled around me, and making it faster to some self-determined spot than some other random person (which happened to be easy, because most people seem to wander). This was fun, but not so much I guess for other people who were walking with me when I would suddenly take off. But this was definitely good jammer training. If Honkers had a derby team, they would EASILY have the most skilled jammers on the planet.

VDL's first block to the head

I also had a job interview in December, and because it was a US school the time difference meant that I was skyping with them at 1am. Interview prep is kind of stressful, but to relax I decided to take a break from it and go to training the night of the interview, which also happened to be my last night of training for the year. Of course, I decided to scrimmage (since it was also my first scrimmage back from injury). It felt really good to scrim again.

Sarge split teams for scrimmaging so that the PhDemons and Cheerbleeders could practice for their bout in February. I mostly pivoted and blocked since I'm not going to be at the bout and it'd be kind of unfair to take up time jamming when others could practice that. Anyway, at one point in the scrim I think Malice hit Junky (who was skating for the PhDemons) and she elbowed me IN THE EYE. She got sent off for the first ever block to the head at VDL, and I copped a black eye and a cut (maybe from the velcro on her elbow pad, or maybe from the force of the elbow splitting the skin or something?), and people brought me ice and were really nice about it but still, there it was, right in time for a job interview.

Oh yeah, and the interview was on a HD Webcam so they could see everything.

This is how it looked the day after, when I had iced it a whole bunch and tried to put concealer over it:
 

I like how it kind of looks like a smiley face.

Also, in that scrim we won and got the first-ever score over 100 points. Yay us.

Also, I didn't end up getting the job. Boo.

Ice skating is now hard.

I went to Melbourne at the end of last year and went skating at the Icehouse with ze boyfriend my and my awesome friend Eugene. Eug and I have been friends since we were both about 5 years old when our mums would take us to the Carribean Rollerama for an afternoon of rolling around and whatnot. It's better than watching TV, yeah? Anyway, at some point I stopped skating until I got into derby, but Eugene never did, only he switched to ice skating.

Is this like "roller disco on ice" night or something?

Anyway, I'd never been to the Icehouse before. It was pretty neat, with two full rinks (one was taken for a kid's birthday party though, boo) and a fake zamboni called an "ice cat" or something that was made in Taiwan. You could also get two different kinds of ice skates: the stupid tall boot figure skate type ones (defaul rentals) or for a $3 upgrade, get hockey skates, that seemed to be much more snug in the boot and also weren't totally guaranteed to wreck your ankles when you fell over. Actually, they were more like derby skate boots, but with a bit of material over your ankle bone as well (but not further up like figure skate boots were). Plus if you were scared about falling and cracking your head open you could rent helmets as well (or, if I had thought about it, I could have brought all my derby gear and been the most padded person on the ice or something). They also had short lessons every hour or so teaching people to skate once the zamboni had done its round.

Eug and ze boyfriend are both better than me on ice. Eug obviously skated, and zbf used to skate a whole bunch when he lived in Norway, so both of them were doing fancy things and skating around me. The last time I went ice skating was when I lived in Toronto at the beginning of 2010; a bunch of people I worked with (who also weren't Canadian) and I would go to a nearby park and skate on the ice and try to play shinny hockey; I really like hockey and I've got some stick skills and I can skate in pretty much a straight line. That was pretty much the level of ability of our non-Canadian ice hockey league. Once we found a bunch of Canadian kids to play with us and they totally schooled us. It's pretty humiliating being beaten by like 7 year olds, especially because they don't play with the mercy rule.

You can't talk about ice hockey and not put in a picture of the Detroit Red Wings.
This is them winning the Stanley Cup in 2008. They also beat Pittsburgh to do it. Yay.

But that was before derby. Back to the Icehouse: at first I found it hard to go from quads to ice skates. For one, ice is OBVIOUSLY way slidier than any skating surface, and you can't vary how much grip you have (like you can by changing your wheels). I found trying to ice skate in derby stance helped a bit but 1) nobody else does derby stance on ice and people thought I was being retarded and 2) at first my derby stance was really overcompensatory because the ice was so slidy so I looked like a hunchback. Oh well. Derby stance was also good for doing big long strides (well, as long as I could do them) so it wasn't like I was shuffling along the ice or anything.

Munty left knee, immediately after the "there are no toe stops
or kneepads in ice skating" incident

Oh yeah, also, despite getting tons of derby stance practice, I fell over. TWICE. Argh! The first time I think I tried to do a speed skater start and didn't have good enough grip, and the second time I lost control and was like "oh well I can use my toe stops OH GOD THERE ARE NO TOE STOPS" and then tried to go into a control knee slide ONLY THERE ARE NO KNEEPADS EITHER. Fuck!! So all I did was bang my knee really hard, straight onto the ice. At first it didn't hurt too much because it was cold, but then when we were outside it started really hurting. This was also my good knee too. And then a nice big fat bruise came up (pics to come).

Anyway, Eug taught us how to do hockey stops, only I can't do them without somehow ending up transitioning or something. I really like plow stops on ice though; if you throw your legs out fast enough you make these little shaved ice spray bits on either side and can stop pretty quickly. Transitions were harder because normally when I transition on quads I have enough friction to only go about 180*, but on ice you don't really so you end up doing a 360 (or in my case, a 540 which just looked like I totally intended to do that. Yay.) Also, crossovers were way harder; on quads you push from your inside wheels out, but on ice skates you don't have that luxury. Leaning into the corners still helped, but the speed/psychological barrier or not having inside pushers made it a bit tricky at first. I got it in the end though, yay. Slaloming was also fun, although I think it looks kind of weird on ice, especially if you backwards slalom (instead of doing backwards snowplows).

Anyway, skating was pretty fun, and I'd probably like to do it again. It took me about 30 mins to figure out how to translate derby skills into ice skating, but I think that would shorten over time. Also, I kept wondering what ice derby would be like. Well, not actual what-is-now ice derby, but like roller derby on ice, obviously. It'd probably be something like ice hockey but without all the goals and giant pads and pucks and stuff, but yeah, that would be mega cool. Actually, I'd also settle for doing ice hockey: if I could skate better, I would really want to have a serious go at it. (Also because Australian ice hockey leagues are pretty small, so there'd be lots of room for kick assery.)

WTF? "Ice Derby" is apparently a real thing, and it looks like this?!?!

The prodigal daughter, part two

So, two things happened last night at training:

1) It rained a lot and the roof leaked onto the track.
2) I got back on skates after a month of injury and got my orange star.

I was injury-paranoid so I taped up BOTH of my ankles.
I would have also taped my knee as well except I ran out of tape.

Yep. Getting back on skates was so awesome. I was kind of stupidly nervous though, like my legs wouldn't know what to do or anything like that. So I was really conscious of being down in derby stance, pushing hard on crossovers, and that sort of thing. But it all came back pretty easily, and after a few laps I was back (except for when I nearly crashed into the bin that was on the track to catch the rain). I have to stretch my ankle a lot more though, because it's still pretty weak, and I was feeling it after a while. Rav took people through training, and Sarge and Legz took me through the remainder of my orange star test. Gah! WTF! So apparently what I had left was booty blocking, whips/pushes, and jumping over cones.

What? Jumps? Hahaha. I was so nervous about that. I'm usually okay with jumps, but I was worried that the force of it would be too much on my munty feet. But anyway, there were a bunch of cones set up and I NAILED IT IN ONE. Part of it was probably because I didn't want to do have to do it multiple times, but I also happened to jump over like seven or eight cones instead of the standard five, because Legz had put two cone-tracks next to each other (one was for people to do the one-leg slalom thing for yellow star). Haha. I'm dumb.

But yeah, then it was booty blocking, whips and pushes. Jillie was partnered up with me for this, and she's kind of mega awesome at skating so I was a bit worried I wouldn't be able to booty block her, or whip her (haha, last time I whipped anyone I ended up on my ass with a concussion). But she was a really good partner and gave me pointers for what to do (we had to skate around other people doing drills). So yeah, that was all good. Then Sarge and Legz tallied up the marks and I passed and got my star! Whoo!! (It was also the last session they were starring people for the year, so I totally squeaked in--no pun intended--to getting my orange.)

But when you have an orange star, you can be drafted onto a team. We got our first two teams announced as well: since we have a varisty themed league, our teams were the Ph.Demons, and the Cheerbleeders! And I'm a Cheerbleeder. Whoo! Sarge picked the names of all the oranges out of a hat and split them randomly, making adjustments for evening up the size, skill, experience etc. of the players. Boudica got drafted onto the Ph.Demons; Sarge split up me and my derby wife! Noes!!! But on the upside, this means I get to beat up my wife in the future, heh.

Oh, fine, so maybe three things happened last night:
3) I got drafted onto the inaugural VDL intraleague team.

I didn't scrimmage last night, but while I was NSO-ing (as the WORST NSO ever since I was wasn't even non-skating :P) I practiced doing some tomohawks and shooting the duck. Ha. Tomorrow is my last training session with VDL until March, and that sucks a bit. Sad face. I really want to scrimmage and 1) live up to my "Most likely to be ejected" shirt and 2) get more use out of my scrimmage tank and 3) try NOT to hipcheck everyone in the knee.

Yep. It was a good night to be back on skates.

That's right, I'm a goddamn champion!

The prodigal daughter, part one

So yesterday we had our end-of-year league BBQ by the skate park. It was pretty awesome. It was sunny and people got drunk and/or skated and I seriously made the worst "Bad Santa" present in the history of shit presents. (I'm really sorry, Bev!) Pictures to come.

This is how I feel my level of skating will be.

And [insert fanfare] today is my return to onskates! Yay!! I am going to be back from the wilderness. After being away in late October for 2 weeks and then basically getting on skates and then wrecking my ankle, I haven't had a proper skate since the time I had a concussion. (Yes, and THAT turned out well...) But yes. I have both my ankles and my knee taped up, and I am mega excited.

Also, no scrimmaging yet; my ankles need to get used to the weight of my skates first, before the weight of my skates AND several derby girls piling up on top of it. But yay. Being able to roll around is a welcome first step.

Oh, except I have to do the remainder of my orange star test. From memory, I have to do booty blocking, agility (jumping over cones), and obstacle avoidance. I have two more sessions before the end of the year and we break for the summer (I miss the last session because I'll be overseas, boo), so if I want to orange before then, it's tonight and Tuesday. I thought I'd do it Tuesday, and spend tonight kind of getting used to being on wheels.

But no. Sarge has other plans for me. Hilariously enough, this is how I found out:

WAT.

I REALLY want my orange, but I'm kind of scared I won't remember how to skate and I will fail the test or munt myself more. In particular, I'm worried that my muscles will have atrophied or something or that I won't have stability (not that I had much to start with) or that my derby stance will be shithouse. Ergh. For some reason this is much more nerve-wracking than when Boudica and I did our yellow star, maybe because last time we did ours together and now I am flying solo (she got hers when she smashed the test a few weeks ago).

 But I'll report back on how I went later tonight.

How it all started

In an IM conversation with boyfriend (who knows I am nuts about derby and I bought him skates for his birthday) today:

[him]:  WTF there's a movie about derby? Have you heard of Whip It?

http://www.foxsearchlight.com/whipit/

Hahahaha. That's so cute. :D

To be fair though, I haven't seen the movie, ever. (It apparently makes derby girls rage though, but meh.) However, it is what sucked me into derby in the first place.

Sponsored by Pro-Tec.
Also, uniform fail on the mouthguards and helmets.

I went to the Toronto International Film Festival the year it premiered and they turned downtown Dundas Square into a big flat track for an exhibition bout. That's kind of where I saw derby first and totally got sucked in. On the day, there was a big crowd there and I couldn't see what was going on, and I climbed up the back of the bleachers on the scaffolding to have a look, and they had two of the Toronto teams bouting and someone was explaining the rules and stuff as they went. It was amazeballs. And so I kind of hung there for the ENTIRE bout with my tiptoes on a piece of scaffolding, trying hard not to fall off. My arms were mega sore and my feet cramped like the dickens but it was worth it. And Drew Barrymore was there but she ignored everyone. Plus one of the people in the movie had my original derby name, which subsequently turned out to be one of the most popular derby names ever or something so... bah.

But yeah. Cutest discussion ever. Yay, memories.

Blood and Thunder!!!

I like how it is an emu and not a kangaroo as everyone would expect.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of months or so, you should know that the first ever roller derby world cup is on in Toronto! It started early this morning Australian time, and it will be going for the next three days. You can watch the bouts live from DNN here: Click here for awesomeness

I'm mega excited about this. Having an international tournament for roller derby raises the profile of the sport, and makes it clear that it is something that's not just played by a handful of 400-pound lesbians (which is actually how someone tried to describe it to me once, really), or that it's all like in "Whip It" when people go about punching each other or something like that, and it gives the sport a greater degree of legitimacy and visibility. Derby girls are actually athletes, and this is a pretty good opportunity to show the world what they can do. Plus, on a more obvious and less philosophical note, it's like all these amazing skaters all descending in one of my favorite cities in the whole world. Fuck yeah. My brain is exploding from all the awesomeness. Or maybe it's because I'm mega-hungry right now.

There are a crap load of countries actually taking part in it, so besides the obvious USA (of which there are two?), Canadian, and Australian teams, there are also teams from Finland, Argentina, Scotland, France, Brazil and Sweden, among others. I probably would have liked to have seen representation from parts of Asia, like Japan and Korea (because I KNOW they have teams there, unlike China or Honkers which don't have any derby to speak of) but hey, this is the first ever international derby tournament so if this is what it is going to be like in its early days, imagine how awesome it would be in years to come.

Here's a video of Team Australia's first bout of the tourney against Team Germany:

Shortstop is frigging awesome, around the 2min mark. I also like when the person taking the video is all like "scheisse!!" randomly. Ha. Australia also won 136-53.

Team Australia v Team Finland is on in like 35 minutes!!! USA v New Zealand in 15!! I don't think I will be doing much work this weekend. Also, now I know how my housemate felt when the Rugby World Cup was on for like a month (he's a Kiwi, go figure). :D