On a crisp September morning, early risers head to Prospect Park to walk their dogs or sit peacefully by the lake overlooking Duck Island, but at the LeFrak Center at Lakeside roller-skating rink, the skidding of wheels intensifies as shrill whistles ring through the chill. The Gotham Roller Derby skaters — geared up in shorts, tank tops, T-shirts, pads on the elbows and knees, and, of course, helmets — warm up, skating languidly backward in an endless circle, laughing and calling out words of encouragement. The world is just waking up, but these skaters are ready to go.
The clashing sounds of skidding skates quickly become rhythmic, following the beat of balletic tangles of limbs as the skaters go through different drills in which the athletes pair up to push on one another as they skate, weave around stout orange cones, and take turns jumping around one brave volunteer. At 10:30 a.m., when the sun emerges from the clouds, the skaters are guided by their coach through a hip-bumping strategy. The air is warming, but they’ve been sweating all morning.
If your only encounter with roller derby is Drew Barrymore’s movie Whip It, you should know that the New York roller-derby skaters are serious about their sport. “The only difference between me and a professional athlete is that I’m not getting paid,” says nanny and freelance writer Molly Reitman, 30, who is known to her teammates as GD (short for her roller-derby name, Goddamn Goddamn). “In another world, this would be our full-time job.”
Gotham, New York City’s legendary roller-derby league, has been around since 2003. The league is structured into six total teams, four of which are considered home teams: Manhattan Mayhem, Queens of Pain, Brooklyn Bombshells, and the Bronx Gridlock. Every active skater in the league gets drafted into one. Additionally, there are two travel teams that compete in international tournaments, the Gotham All-Stars and the Wall Street Traitors, which means that travel-team athletes have double the practice times. “For the first year I was here, I thought I was going to throw up at every scrimmage — and we were hot shit in our old league,” says Reitman, who coaches the Bronx Gridlock and plays for the All-Stars with her partner, Samia Harb (also known as Fatoosh Bag). “We were two of the best people in our old league, which was not even that bad of a league. But coming here, it was like, Whoa. Like, they do shit different. But they have to — because if you’re gonna be the best in the world, you have to have a different standard.”
Many skaters on the team hold a variety of jobs outside the skating world; they are photographers, science teachers, psychologists, and artists. Some moved here from across the world: Francesca, 30, was competing in Pennsylvania on a six-month tourist visa when she considered staying in the U.S. “We won the tournament with my Argentinean team, and it was very close to New York,” she explains.
Photographer Sofie Vasquez has been captivated by the sport since watching Whip It as a teenager. “I’ve been dreaming of doing a roller-derby project for years,” she says. But she’s coming in at a particularly difficult time for the league; when COVID hit, Gotham lost its practice space and hasn’t been able to find a new one. Because of the high costs of renting out LeFrak, the skaters aren’t able to practice as often. The space also converts into an ice rink when it gets cold, so they can’t practice in the winter. The league is technically a nonprofit organization, and it’s barely breaking even. “We’re making it work, but it would just be nice to have the resources to work and to maintain Gotham Roller Derby,” says Harb.
By 7 p.m., the skaters huddle in a practice tussle on one side of the rink. On the other side, they skate in circles, pausing to hop over Reitman, who is positioned as if about to trip someone. It was a long day, but they needed to prepare for their final championship of the season on October 19. Vasquez works full time and lives a two-hour commute away from the rink. But whenever she feels exhausted by the prospect of capturing the skaters’ athleticism, she thinks about what she learned from watching Whip It as a kid. “I remember that joy I got, where I was like, Oh my God, that’s so badass, she says. “And it’s even more badass because they’re doing gravity-defying scrimmages.”
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