A Little Bit Of History

This is an excerpt from a piece that David Morgan wrote some time ago about the history of speed skating in Australia. David himself has been involved in the sport in Australia since 1947.

Our First Winter Olympian
Our first Winter Olympian was a Speed Skater, Kenneth George Kennedy, from Sydney.
Kennedy represented our country at the 1936 Winter Olympics held at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany. He had, like most of the serious skating fraternity of the time in this country, a good base of training in all of the skating disciplines, Figure, Speed and Ice Hockey.
He travelled to England in 1935, and competed in the British Indoor Speed Skating Championships, winning the quarter and half mile titles, establishing new record times while doing so.
This opened the opportunity for him to be nominated for the Olympic Winter Games, which was indeed a serious challenge.
In those far off days, the only internationally recognised Speed Skating was under the control of the International Skating Union, and their rules were based around competitions known today as "Long Track". This used a skating track that was 400 metres around one lap. (About the size of an athletics track on a field like the Olympic Stadium at Homebush.) In actual dimensions, a Long
Track rink requires at least three times the area of one Short Track rink.
Also, all the Olympic Skating sports were contested on outdoor naturally frozen ice. Air temperatures are much lower than inside an artificial rink. Long Track is based around the concept of competition against the clock, rather than racing skater to skater. As you could imagine, the techniques for this type speed skating were very different from the ones that Kennedy, and his contemporaries in Australia and the UK, had been used to. In Indoor, or Short Track, because first skater across the finish line is the winner, the winner only has to go as fast as necessary to defeat the other competitors in the race. In the Long Track sport, you are timed, so if you aren't the last skater to be timed, you have no idea of what time you have to skate to win the event.
This, coupled with the vastly bigger surface on which the skaters skate, means that entirely different techniques need to be used to win an event.
Kennedy was on his own at these Olympics. This is always a difficult situation for an athlete, never mind that the conditions at these Olympics were totally different from any that he had previously experienced. He had no easy task to perform as well as he did. There were 52 competitors at the 1936 Games, and Kennedy’s results were 29th in the 500 metres, 33rd in the 1500 metres and 33rd in the 5000 metres. He did not skate in the 10,000 metres.

Subsequent Olympic developments
World War II intervened in any further development by our speed skaters, but by 1949 we had several men and a couple of ladies who were adventurous enough to venture to Europe, specifically to Norway, to test their ability on the Long Track circuits.
Many events were held in the months from late November to late February in such countries as Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. The results that they achieved were used to nominate the best for inclusion in Winter Olympic teams from 1952 onwards, or to qualify them for inclusion to skate for Australia at the World Championships.
The most successful of this group was a Melbourne skater called Colin Hickey who represented us at the Olympics three times, 1952, 1956 and 1960.
Hickey’s time of 41.9 seconds for the 500 metres in 1960 was good enough to place him 7th in the Games. That was our best performance at Winter Olympics until 1976, when another Melbourne skater, Colin Coates, skated into 6th place in the 10,000 metres at the Innsbruck Games.
Coates incidentally, holds the record for the greatest number of Olympic Winter Games competed at by anyone – he represented us six times from 1968 to 1988.