Wheelers And Dealers

This is for those of you who still think roller skating exists to provide work for organists. And for those of you who think of skate keys, skinned knees, dreary rinks and big Joanie Weston busting up pretty skulls every week on the tube for the immortal Bay Bombers.

At the Pan-American Games last week, the sport of roller skating streaked toward the '80s as forcefully as if it had been propelled by a six-man whip. But if you haven't yet noticed the 28 million-plus Americans whizzing around on skates, and 16-year-olds everywhere turning into John Travoltas on wheels, the idea of roller skating as an international sport may still seem a bit strange.

"People are amazed when they find out just how much the sport has grown," says Charles Wahlig, the American speed-team coach.

Though competitive roller skating is as popular in southern Europe as ice skating is in the north, in America interest has been largely confined to participants and their families, and what used to be a small community of skate manufacturers and rink operators. World championships have been held for years in each of the sport's three disciplines—artistic, speed and hockey—but last week marked the first occasion on which all three were contested in an international multisport meet as large as the Pan-Am Games. For this booming sport, it was a giant step toward the ultimate goal—the Olympic Games—which it almost assuredly will reach by 1988.

In Puerto Rico, the U.S. skaters provided as much excitement and just as much grace and beauty as their ice-skating counterparts would have in a winter Olympics. Americans won 10 of 16 possible gold medals—the hockey is being played this week—including all four in artistic skating and six in speed.

This was a surprise, because all speed skating in the U.S. is done indoors on un-banked wooden 100-meter tracks, while the track in Puerto Rico was outdoors, banked, 200 meters around and surfaced with polished cement. The only training on such a track that the U.S. skaters had done was during a two-week trip to Italy in early May.

It was fitting that in a brand new Pan-Am sport so important to the Americans, Ken Sutton, an 18-year-old who attends Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Mich., won the first gold medal of the Games in the 500-meter race against the clock, and a second in the 500-meter round robin. Tom Peterson, a 20-year-old skate salesman from Tacoma. became a winner of four golds, taking the 5,000-and 10,000-meter races, and the week's premier event, the 20,000-meter (12.4-mile) marathon. He also was on a winning relay team.

The 15 entrants in the marathon, representing the U.S., Puerto Rico, Argentina and Colombia, inspired a symphony of honking horns from halted traffic as they sped westward along Highway 165 beside the palm-lined north beaches from Cata�o, an industrial town across the bay from San Juan. They rolled past the Bacardi Rum factory, past Levittown, past large fields of sugar cane toward the quaint little town of Dorado.

The Puerto Rican and Colombian skaters fell out of the lead pack early, leaving four Americans and three Argentines. Three miles into the race, one of the Argentines lost a wheel and crashed to the pavement. A teammate stopped to help him replace the wheel. That left the Americans, each taking his turn in the lead to draft the others, and the lone remaining Argentine, Raul Subiledt, all skating in unison in a tight column, sometimes reaching speeds of 30 mph.

Several times the Americans tried to sprint away from Subiledt, but they couldn't shake him. Approaching Dorado and the steep 90-meter hill near the finish, Peterson pumped furiously and opened a sizable lead. When he reached the center of town, he had to search to find the finish line, then had to thread his way through the cheering crowd and various motor vehicles to cross it. A children's band played and fire sirens blared. Peterson's time was 36:37.0, an average speed of nearly 21 mph; Chris Snyder of Euless, Texas finished eight seconds later, followed by Subiledt.