By David F. Rooney
The young lovelies of the Revelstoke Derailers fired the Penticton Pistoleras out the door by a score of 240-79 on Saturday proving to one and all that they are a force to be reckoned with on the provincial roller derby scene.
The girls, who started the local team just this past winter, were cheered to victory by a crowd of well over 500 people many of whom had absolutely no idea about the rules for Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby or the way scoring was achieved in this new (for Revelstoke) sport. For a lot of the men that didn’t matter as much as the opportunity to watch scantily clad young women wearing fishnet stockings body check each other. As for the female spectators… it was likely a chance to cheer on the competitors — many of them their friends, neighbours and relatives — in a sport that is almost exclusively female. I suspect, too, that the women in the stands enjoyed the cartoon character of the ‘violence’ on the rink as much as their menfolk did. After all it didn’t appear to be serious. There was no blood and the pratfalls all seemed to be humourous in nature.
And it really did look like a heck of a lot of fun — even if the rules and scoring were truly mysterious — so it seems likely that roller derby is here to stay.
Here are a few photos from Saturday night’s game —Oh! And if you can’t live without knowing the rules, please click here to have that mystery solved for you:
