TOFIELD TEEN A PART OF ROLLER DERBY REVIVAL

Former junior roller derby star with Highway 14 Roller Derby Association, Fallaine Matula from Tofield recently won the MVP Jammer Award for the A-level Edmonton E-ville Dead team in its win over Anarchy Angels of Vancouver at Lynden, Washington at the end of February.

Fallaine’s team crushed the BC competitors 306-72 after having the fortune of a couple of their key players dropping out with injuries before the contest. But the 19-year-old said it was likely her Edmonton team (ranked 78th out of 322 teams playing in the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, WFTD) would have still won the game.

The sport of roller derby has gone back to its roots. It was originally developed from banked-track skating marathons of the 1930s, into a professional sport in the 1940s which attracted 50 million spectators in 50 American cities at its height. However, the sport began to decline into “sports entertainment” as the 20th Century rolled along and became more like professional wrestling where the theatrical aspects began overshadowing the athleticism of the game. By the end of the millennium roller derby nearly vanished.

But since the turn of the 21st Century, the sport has seen a revival and although Fallaine is too young to remember any of the sport’s sordid past, she says their association (WFTD) is now trying to get the sport into the Olympics playing the new flat track version… FOR MORE SEE THE MARCH 21/17 MERCURY