(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – Roller derby is again having a moment in Chicago, the city where the sport was created nearly a century ago.
Promoter Leo Seltzer is credited with cooking up the combative spectacle of women on roller skates in the mid-1930s. Seltzer’s son, Jerry, made roller derby a pop-culture staple with the help of televised matches in subsequent decades.
By the turn of the 21st century, however, the wheels had long left the track. Chicago didn’t even have a team in the early 2000s when resident Elizabeth Gomez visited Austin, Texas and discovered the sport had been revived in that city.
With the encouragement of other clubs across the U.S., Gomez helped organize a sort of grass-roots roller derby outpost in her hometown, which today is known as Chicago-Style Roller Derby. The successful local effort is marking its 20-year anniversary this year.
Some may think of roller derby as a free-for-all with cheap shots galore, but a governing organization, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, represents more than 400 member leagues on six continents. There are strict rules over how participants may engage, as a team's four “blockers” and their single “jammer” roll around the track to earn points against the other team; no punching or shots to the spine are allowed.
The theatrical nature of roller derby endures, with athletes dressing up in intimidating fashion and sporting colorful nicknames (Gomez’s alter ego, for example, is “Juanna Rumble”). The sport also has become known as an inclusive environment.
“It's like, here's a welcoming space that's going to allow you to be who you really are on every level. And it has nothing to [expletive] do with men, sorry,” Gomez says.
Chicago-Style and the history of roller derby is the focus of this week’s Looped In: Chicago podcast.
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