Roller Derby Revival
I first heard about roller derby last year, while reading through an indie girls’ e-zine, and thought, what the hell is roller derby? I didn’t really give it much thought again until I heard of the roller derby leagues that were starting to pop up around Australia, and discovered that people I knew were getting involved. At first, I was skeptical. I didn’t know what the game was about, only that the men I knew were busy drooling over it.
In the subsequent months of researching and discovering what roller derby is all about, I found myself hooked. How it happened, I don’t know. Somehow I went from quietly objecting to the men who were objectifying the sport to wholeheartedly embracing the idea of joining a roller derby team. But despite its surprising popularity, there are still a lot of people who have no idea what roller derby is, let alone that it even exists.
Roller derby is a sport played on roller skates, or quad skates, and consists of two teams skating around either a flat or banked track. The teams consist of blockers, who skate around the track in a pack; a pivot, who sets the pace of the pack and is the last line of defense; and a jammer, who is the points scorer. Jammers score points by skating through the pack and passing members of the opposite team. The blockers try to slow the jammer of the opposing team, and help their own jammer through. And in the process, you will get hurt. Pretty straight forward, right?
And roller derby is not a new thing either. It’s been around in various forms since the beginning of the 20th century, and has gone through multiple revivals and disappearances from popular culture. It has had its place on television from time to time, and struggled during the ‘50s to gain legitimacy as a sport. Early roller derby games were almost reminiscent of professional wresting, with exaggerated falls and crowd pleasing antics being a central part to the games. Leo Seltzer, who first became involved in the roller derby scene in the 1920s and ‘30s, pushed for these antics to cease, and was a key figure in legitimising the sport. However, even today, there are arguments against roller derby being a “real” sport.
Today’s incarnation of roller derby is a grassroots revival, rather than a commercial endeavour like in previous years. It is a predominantly female scene, and has a strong DIY flavour to it. Played typically on the amateur circuit, women of all walks of life are joining in on the action, and a feminist-positive attitude is highly evident. The violence of the sport challenges the typical views of female sports, and offers an outlet not readily available to women.
Krista Wehrmann of New Zealand’s Dead End Derby League raises the very legitimate point that “Rugby is our national sport, and that’s so socially accepted that you go and knock dudes down and you fuck them up and they get broken collarbones and all sorts of shit, and because we’re girls, we’re supposed to play nice, and that’s why it seems a bit more shocking I think.” Roller derby is one of the few full contact sports available to women, and unlike a sport like boxing, is very much a woman’s sport, and is accessible to women of all shapes and sizes.
So, since discovering this amazing full contact sport that will let me dress up in fishnets and tutus and be violent, I’ve purchased my own skates, and I’m practicing for the next fresh meat intake, and with any luck, I’ll be a roller girl myself in the next few months.
Roller Derby Links
Roller Derby Explained
Brutiful – A Roller Derby Documentary
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Got me interested