No ice, no skate: Kids stay out of sport as their indoor rink gets closed for repairs

The parents of children going in for figure skating in Yerevan fear staying out of sport for a year while the city authorities are renovating their indoor ice rink will do no good to them.

Figure Skating School Director Meline Avagyan says that two decades have passed since the facility was repaired last and the school’s management has repeatedly raised this issue. She advises the parents (of some 200 kids attending the school) to take the matter in its stride, since Yerevan Mayor Gagik Beglaryan “has promised to provide appropriate premises within a year.”

The parents of children going in for figure skating in Yerevan fear staying out of sport for a year while the city authorities are renovating their indoor ice rink will do no good to them.

Figure Skating School Director Meline Avagyan says that two decades have passed since the facility was repaired last and the school’s management has repeatedly raised this issue. She advises the parents (of some 200 kids attending the school) to take the matter in its stride, since Yerevan Mayor Gagik Beglaryan “has promised to provide appropriate premises within a year.”

“In any case, those premises are of no use anymore as they are in complete disrepair,” said Avagyan.

Meanwhile, the parents of children hardly believe these promises and say that have heard many of them while turning to appropriate bodies over the absence of ice in the Karen Demirchyan Sport and Concert Complex in the summer and autumn months. Even though the school’s director says that it will start working in just a week’s time, five-year-old Vahan Khachatryan’s grandmother does not trust it will.

“They have been telling us since May that they melted the ice for some sport games and will restore it in a few weeks, but they haven’t done it until today, and I don’t know what to tell my grandson who keeps begging me to take him to the ice,” says the woman.

The ice rink at the Sport and Concert Complex is the only one in the republic where professional training can be organized, since the open-air ice rink made available during winter months at Karapi Lich (Swan Lake) in central Yerevan is not suitable for professional training that aims to achieve good results.

It was in last December that renowned Russian figure-skater Yevgeniy Plyuschenko came to Armenia and announced that he would found a school at the Karen Demirchyan Sport and Concert Complex as he saw “great desire in the eyes of Armenian children, which is the most important thing in figure skating.”

Many took that news with great enthusiasm and there was talk that figure skating and ice dancing would become developed in Armenia, with the support of the great Russian athlete. However, neither the school has been opened, nor the promised foreign specialists have arrived.

The only positive thing was the presence of an ice rink. A monthly fee paid by parents for their children to train there was 10,000 drams ($26).

But the children who get their training in Yerevan conditions do not achieve any high results at competitions. Only recently two young figure skaters, brothers Sargis and Slavik Hayrapetyan, took second and fourth places, respectively, at the championships of Commonwealth of Independent States and Baltic countries in the men’s single section, and that was largely due to the fact that they have already trained in Russia for three years.

When the Winter Olympics open in Vancouver, Canada, in February, Armenian fans of winter sport will have limited countrymen to cheer. Many here had seen the opening of a skating school as a step toward creating more interests and development in such sports. Such hopes, for now, have been put on ice.