Next Saturday, the Varea Sports Center will host a historic event in the city as the first official derby match in Logroño will be held there. At 6:00 pm, the local Roller Derby Rioja will face a team of players from Caceres and Salamanca. Presented this morning by the Sports Adviser, Rubén Antonanzas, Leticia Fyuk and Nuria Zuniga of the Roller Derby Rioja.
Roller derby is a women’s sport based on contact, speed and strategy. It originated in the 1920s in the United States, and was created and practiced by women. It is played with traditional quad skates, and the skating is always on a track in a counterclockwise direction. Each team consists of five players, a scorer and a goalkeeper, who have to score points while bypassing the opponent’s defences. Matches last for two 30-minute halves.
Apart from the technical characteristics of the sport, Rubén Antonanzas emphasized the philosophy that this discipline wants to promote: “It advocates for the empowerment of women, forcing the federations to have a majority council of women and seeking to comfort the players at every moment. It’s a goal that Logroño Sport fully shares, in fact we’ve made changes to our assisting rules to reinforce that equality.
The sport also becomes a tool to combat homophobia, transphobia and other gender-related phobias, with appropriate regulations and code of conduct in place for this purpose. It is also concerned with the inclusion of minorities and people at risk of exclusion.
Another of its characteristics is that the clubs, the ‘leagues’, are controlled by the players, through grouping and self-management. This is how Roller Derby Rioja works, which started in 2019 and currently consists of 14 passionate skaters with the ability to excel, with experience on other national and international teams (Madrid, Canada, Ireland and France). They also have two coaches with years of practice in the sport.
their desire to play and enjoy physical exercise and healthy competition; While promoting values such as respect, healthy spare time, cooperation, self-improvement, diversity, and responsibility.
In the sports field, they aspire to continue to organize official matches, and for the next season, participate in the national championship, placing themselves in the top 10 teams in Spain. It’s time to host a tournament in Logroño and intensify the training of referees.
In the next stage, the desire of these athletes is to form a children’s team, reach the top five in Spain and celebrate an international championship.
In this sense, Antoñanzas committed to supporting Logroño Deporte to facilitate the growth of the derby in the city: “At the moment they train and play at a local sports centre, the Varea Centre. It is exciting for us to see the birth of new sports emerging through our activities or facilities. From Logroño Deportes we want to promote new disciplines and even those based on values with which we fully agree, as is the case with the Roller derby.
