Former hockey player, 61, is still on the ice
Beginners.
He sees them all the time. After all, ice skating looks fairly easy: Put on skates. Get on ice. Fall. Get up. Fall. Get off the ice.
"Most people try to skate forward. You must push your feet side to side. Skate at angles. Knees bent. Stretch out arms for balance," says Inner Harbor Ice Rink manager Gilles Boisvert -- and don't ask us to pronounce his name.
In this free introductory lesson, Mr. Boisvert implores first-time skaters to first pick a skate that's a half-size smaller than your shoe size. Lace tightly, so you skate "on the blade and not on the boot," Mr. Boisvert says.
The 61-year-old former hockey player (goalie for the Baltimore Clippers in the 1960s) tells rookie skaters to use the back of their skates. Keep your weight on the back foot. If you skate on the tip of your skates, you'll lose your balance and acquire bruises the size of a minor Hawaiian island.
As a boy in Quebec, Mr. Boisvert learned to skate the way everyone else did: Someone put a chair on the ice, and you tried pushing it. This forced you to skate side-to-side. Taught you balance, too. In two hours, you were a skater, he says.
"The insurance people now won't let you put anything on the ice," he says.
He recommends that when you fall, "Let yourself go." Try to fall on your side or backside. Breaking your fall with your wrist is a bad, bad idea. And first-time skaters, keep in mind the Great Truth about ice skating: Ice is hard.
D8 "Don't let your head hit it," says the rink manager. Leslie White has no trouble explaining the 15 to 20 hours she devotes every week to her volunteer job for Maryland's 1995 winter Special Olympics, set for Feb. 26-28 at the Wisp ski resort in Western Maryland.
"The biggest reward comes in watching the athletes train and compete," says the 42-year-old risk-management consultant, who runs her firm, LTW Risk Managers, out of her Severna Park home.
It also gives her a chance to exercise skills she developed as a one-time professional ski instructor at Ski Liberty in Fairfield, Pa.
Every year, the Maryland Special Olympics allows hundreds of mentally handicapped Marylanders to compete in dozens of individual and team events. And every year since 1985, when she volunteered as an alpine skiing coach for the 1986 games, Leslie White has been there to help out.
She's proven a valuable asset. Not only have her duties progressed from coaching a single event to organizing the entire competition (with the help of a 25-member committee), but she has been honored as Special Olympics' 1994 Volunteer of the Year.
"She has given above and beyond the call of her duty," says Mary Beth Hunt, Special Olympics' vice president of sports program. "She volunteers to be at every event, beyond the winter games. Recently, she has done a risk-management study for us. There's never a task we give her that she doesn't help us do."
Ms. White is proud to display the pewter dish she was awarded. But, she says, the real honor and pleasure comes from working with the men and women, some severely handicapped, who make Special Olympics such a treat for all those connected with it.
The best feeling, she says, is "watching the athletes as they learn new skills [and] achieve things that they and perhaps other people never thought they could achieve."
Chris Kaltenbach