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By Dan Plouffe
With temperatures dipping around -20°C and a bit of a howling wind too, it wasn’t the kind of weekend where many people would feel inspired to jump into a skinsuit and venture outdoors in Ottawa, but Mike Rivet sure wasn’t going to complain about the cold for one second.
“Some are,” he smiled, “But I’m not.”
The long-time local coach/guru of all things long-track speed skating was simply pleased that the Brewer Park Oval was able to host the 2025 Ontario Championships on Feb. 1-2. They’d had to cancel the provincials the past two years without skateable ice, and in other years, they’ve had to reschedule the meet in hopes of finding the right window of weather, or shorten it to a single day.
“It’s been a tough three, four, five years,” Rivet underlines. “It’s a nice change this year for sure.”
Rivet, who leads ice maintenance on the outdoor Brewer Oval on top of his coaching duties, has been grateful for the consistent cold weather throughout January that’s allowed them to bring back ice conditions like years ago.
“When it’s warm, people go on the ice and they do damage it a bit, and it’s hard to rebuild again,” notes the Gloucester Concordes Speed Skating Club head coach. “We’ve had a good stretch without weather throwing us off. It’s been pretty, pretty solid.”
Rivet has welcomed the opportunity to work with local skaters outdoors for most of a month before the provincials. In recent years, he’s seen long-track speed skating lose its lustre a little in Ontario, which has no refrigerated ovals. Of course weather and the lack of ice affects proper training, he outlines, but it also pushes long-track speed skating farther from athletes’ psyches since they often become so focused on racking up points on the provincial short-track circuit that they won’t go try a long-track event.
“That’s where the big impact is,” Rivet explains. “It minimizes the exposure to long-track, and then it minimizes your opportunity for developing the Ivanies, the Isabelles, the Vincents and all those guys.”
The skaters Rivet mentions, of course, are Beijing 2022 Olympic medallists Ivanie Blondin and Isabelle Weidemann and three-time Olympian Vincent De Haître, all Concordes and Brewer Oval products. Rivet is looking forward to making what’s become a usual pilgrimage to celebrate Blondin’s female athlete of the year honour this Wednesday at the Ottawa Sports Awards, which presented him with a lifetime achievement award for coaching in 2018.
Read More: HIGH ACHIEVERS: Ivanie Blondin, Tyrone Henry repeat as Ottawa Sports Awards’ athletes of the year
A local athlete currently rising up on the provincial and national stage is Charlotte Babin, a neo-junior (under-16) skater who posted the fastest time out of all females in the 1,000 metres at the Ontario Championships.
The Ottawa Pacers athlete also finished in the top-10 of each of the 500, 1,000 and 1,500 m at this season’s Canadian Neo-Junior Championships in Fort St. John, B.C., where she also won a team pursuit silver medal.
“She’s developing well. Her mindset is good and her technical skills are coming along super well,” Rivet highlights. “She’s a pretty dedicated young athlete, very focused. And she’s a digger. That’s one of the traits that’s hard to get in athletes, but she works very hard.”