Washington State’s Rink of Olympic Dreams - New York Times

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FEDERAL WAY, Wash. — At Pattison’s West Skating Center on Monday afternoon, three college students toted ice skates into a roller rink.

The first family of Pacific Northwest roller skating opened this facility in 1979, and the only ice the Pattisons ever needed went directly into soft drinks. But the students’ confusion was also understandable. Because in this city of strip malls, 20 minutes south of Seattle, two elite short-track speedskaters used a different kind of training wheels.

Between them, Apolo Ohno and J. R. Celski have won 11 world championships and 7 Olympic medals, including silver (Ohno) and bronze (Celski) last Saturday in the 1,500 meters. Soon after, someone called Pattison’s about ice lessons.

“It’s nice and warm in here,” Mike Pattison, the family patriarch, told the students. “But this is where Apolo and J. R. learned how to skate.”

The Pattisons traveled to Vancouver to watch the two Olympians they helped produce. They paid $1,200 for four tickets and sat in the front row, the best seats in the house. They watched Ohno win his sixth Winter Olympic medal, the most for an American man, and saw Celski secure his first.

At that moment, the memories flooded back. Like a teenage Ohno break-dancing between skating sessions, performing his patented windmill. Or Celski rolling past adults at age 3, his skates and body nearly equal in size.

“Everything started there,” said Yuki Ohno, Apolo’s father. “That was the beginning.”

Pattison’s West sits on the Pacific Highway near a massage parlor, a storage facility and a chiropractor. The sign out front advertised this week’s adult R&B night.

Instead of a training ground for Olympic speedskaters, it looked like any other roller rink: strobe lights, pop music, gumball machines, arcade, popcorn, pretzels.

But Pattison’s West is not a normal rink. Elite inline skaters have traveled from Florida to practice here. Pattison’s Team X-treme has won the Northwest championship every year since 1988 and produced more than 100 national champions.

The man considered the top inline skater in the United States, Joey Mantia, trains here. Most of the national inline records he continues to break once belonged to Chad Hedrick, now a long-track speedskater competing in his second Winter Olympics.

Ohno stumbled in by accident. He lived down the street. Pattison’s son, Shaun, gave Ohno the nickname Chunkie, and the photographs on the wall show Ohno, who now has 2.8-percent body fat, with some heft around his midsection.

Pattison remembered how Ohno always carried a lunch pail filled with juice, fruits and vegetables. Yuki remembered the line of children that snaked out the door of the arcade looking to challenge his son in video games.

They called Ohno the I-5 speedskater back then, because he continually traveled up and down the interstate, to swimming, in-line skating, speedskating and for the Northwest Boys Choir. But that all served a purpose, Yuki said, because when Ohno started with the United States team, he had already cross-trained for years.

Celski’s family discovered Pattison’s at the same time, despite an eight-year age difference between the Olympians. Celski comes from a large, close, skating clan. In 2001, he and his father, Bob, won national inline championships for their age groups.

Ohno struck the Pattisons as more outgoing than Celski, but the two shared several traits, including parents who videotaped their races and studied skating, including drive and intensity and, above all, speed.

“Both were incredible skaters,” Mike Pattison said. “They could really fly.”

At Pattison’s, both future Olympians were infused with skating passion that runs four generations deep. The Pattison family tree doubles as local roller skating history. Weston Betts, Mike’s grandfather, built the first rink, the one at nearby Redondo Beach that burned down in 1951.

Betts also opened Pattison’s North across the state, in Spokane. He eventually sold that rink to his daughter, who later sold it to her nephew, who still runs it.

At one time, Mike and his three siblings each owned a rink. Among the siblings and their cousins, four generations of Pattisons have run the family business all over Washington State. Mike’s father, Pat, competed in one of the first sanctioned roller skating races, in 1938.

By the time Mike Pattison finished high school, he wanted out of the skating business. But after four years in the Navy, he returned. At 60, he is still working 13-hour days.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve skated,” said Darin Pattison, Mike’s son. “And so has everybody else here.”

Only now, Pattison’s is known as much for ice skating as its rolling counterpart. Ohno switched to ice after watching the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. Celski followed after watching Ohno grab gold at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002.

Among the first to make the transition from in-line skates was K.C. Boutiette, who skated long track on four Olympic teams.

Mike Pattison says those who made the transition have an advantage because in-line skates are heavier and do not glide like ice skates.

“It’s running with weights on, or skating with a parachute behind you,” he said. “When they get to short track, it’s like they’ve been resistance training for 10 years.”

Pattison says he wishes Ohno and Celski, who were scheduled to compete again Wednesday night in the 1,000-meter preliminaries, had continued with in-line skating, but he also recognizes the platform provided by the Olympics. He hopes that one day in-line skating will join the Summer Games.

For now, he plans to plaster the front wall with pictures and clipped newspaper articles in homage to Celski and Ohno. He pointed to the picture of the 11-year-old Nick Snyder on the wall and other young in-line champions. The next Ohno, Pattison said, is up there somewhere.

“Hopefully, some little kid right now is watching this,” Celski said. “And having the same aspirations that we did, the same goals.”

Like Pattison’s 5-year-old granddaughter, who is already on skates and recently announced her goal — to compete in speedskating in the Olympics.

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