Velodrome rink history, despite resident’s plea

Ed Rudolph, the father of Northbrook’s world-famous speed-skating legacy, was buried last week. The giant Northbrook skating rink where generations of speed-skaters trained for the Olympics seems dead, as well.

The Northbrook Park District stopped winter conversion of the Ed Rudolph Velodrome, the district’s 41-year-old bike track, to a competition-style speed-skating track at least five years ago. This year, the town that gave a speed-skater to nearly every U.S. Winter Olympics team since 1956, won’t be sending any skaters to the games.

The loss of the velodrome as a speed-skating venue infuriates Sam Poulos, 81, father of Northbrook’s last Olympic medal-winner, Leah Poulos. “It’s disgusting, as far as I'm concerned,” he said last week. “Northbrook isn’t doing anything.”

Former venue

The velodrome, built by Rudolph in 1960, for years served three masters. In warm weather, cyclists raced around its perimeter, and soccer games were played in the infield, where the district maintains one of the best fields in town. In winter, the whole surface was flooded to create one of only a handful of full-size, long-track speed-skating rinks in America, giving area skaters an advantage over other regions.

Now, Northbrook is no longer a center for long-track speed-skating. The members of the Northbrook Speedskating Club concentrate on the short-track version of the sport, an Olympic event, but a lower-profile one. It’s considered more rough-and-tumble, and less of a classic speed contest, with numerous lane crossings of competing skaters slowing down the pace.

Poulos fired off a letter to the Park District last week, complaining about the district’s lack of interest in maintaining the ice surface he called “one of the finest in the country until some years ago.”

District director Ed Harvey said last Thursday that his crews have indeed given up on the velodrome rink, but not because of a lack of will. He said the velodrome no longer holds water, and neither does harsh criticism of the district’s actions there.

“It started when the Meadowhill Pool was rebuilt in 1988-1989, I'm pretty sure,” Harvey said. “It lowered the water table.”

He said contractors created a deep, porous underlayment beneath the pool, to let winter rains seep far beneath the concrete. That way, when the water freezes, the bottom of the pool wouldn’t heave and crack. Harvey said that it seems the work was close enough to the velodrome that water seeping through the soccer field now travels to the area below the pool before it can freeze.

Water seeps out

Harvey said that district crews tried year after year to try to fill the velodrome, and failed every time.

“It wasn’t built to be an ice rink, and it has one of our premier soccer fields in the infield,” Harvey said. “Ice doesn’t do the grass any good.”

He said that laying a big plastic membrane over the bicycle track and infield might solve both problems. “But it would be of tremendous size. That seems to me awfully expensive, for what would be (practices) and one meet per year. It doesn’t seem to me to be an efficient use of resources.”

Harvey said though the district doesn’t have a long track anymore, Northbrook crews have done yeoman work keeping the big Tower Rink on Cedar Lane operating. The village’s oldest, biggest rink has been hard to keep frozen, he said, since the area’s topography was altered when the Northbrook Public Library was built.

Poulos doesn’t buy the Park District’s explanation about the velodrome, but he has a long-running dispute with some of the staff there. He said his own long-track skating club fell on hard times partly because the district wouldn’t let him switch on the Meadowhill South lights to let his skaters train by running up and down the hill there at night, similar to how his daughter worked out.

Bad precedent

Harvey maintains that turning on the lights for an organization like Poulos’ Mid-America Speed-skating Club would have created a bad precedent. “It’s not a park district program, and if we start allowing people to turn on the lights, we’re going to have problems,” he said. “We'd be opening the floodgates if we let someone turn on the lights, or if we gave them a key to the lights.”

John Buehler, a long-time leader of the Northbrook Speedskating Club, which is affiliated with the district, said he accepts the district’s explanation about how difficult it is to create ice in the velodrome. He regrets that, years ago, an initiative by Poulos, his organization and others to build an enclosed long-track arena in Northbrook faltered. “We skate in Milwaukee, but it could have been in Northbrook,” he said.

Buehler’s organization skates occasionally in Milwaukee’s Pettit National Ice Center, the Midwest’s only enclosed long-track arena, but practices mostly in the Northbrook Park District’s Sports Center. The enclosed rinks there are big enough for short-track racing.

“We had a couple of guys we were hopeful for the Olympics, but they didn’t quite make it,” he said last week.

Saturday, the Olympic Torch was carried through the Chicago area on its way to Salt Lake City, home of the 2002 Winter Games. Former Olympic speed-skating champion Bonnie Blair held it high as she skated a couple of laps around the Pettit Center.

The torch never passed through Northbrook.