Famous Roller Skaters
If you get really good at speed skating, roller hockey, roller derby or any of the other great roller sports available, you might reach the pinnacle of your sport as these athletes have.
CJ Yoder
Roller hockey player CJ Yoder made it onto the U.S. roller hockey team in nine different years and earned a gold medal for his team in eight of those years. From 2001 until the present, he has been the team's captain, and serves as the Rocky Mountain Division Coordinator from his home in Colorado.
Chad Hedrick
This speed skater is even more famous for his prowess on the ice than he is for his roller skating. However, before he switched to ice skating in 2002, he revolutionized the sport of inline skating by inventing the "double push," which replaces the gliding motion traditional to skating with a second push. This can make the experienced "double pusher" nearly twice as fast. After nearly a decade in the upper echelon of the inline speed skating world, he was inspired to switch to the higher profile sport of speed ice skating after watching the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. By the time the 2006 Olympics came around, Hedrick had broken numerous records in his new sport and racked up a gold, a silver and a bronze medal in Turin.
James Leonard Plimpton
While James Leonard Plimpton was probably a good skater, his main claim to fame is as the man who built the first roller skating rinks in the United States, during the second half of the 19th century. As an inventor, he pioneered the modern quad roller skate, and as a civic organizer, he founded the New York Roller Skating Association, the nation's first. Roller skating in the United States would not be the same without Plimpton's commitment to the sport.
Melicious
Melicious, aka Melissa Joulwan, helped found the Texas Rollergirls and plays on a team called the Hotrod Honeys. She won the Miss Texas Rollergirl title in 2003. She is also an author of a biography about roller derby, "Rollergirl: Totally True Tales from the Track". Joulwan's writing skills, as well as her ability to batter the competition, has helped raise awareness for women's roller derby.
Carlos Urquia
This flamboyant Argentinian figure roller skater took the top honor, a gold medal, in the inline event at the South American Roller Figure Skating Championships, held in Paraguay in 2010. Here is a short video of Urquia pulling off a difficult triple flip.