Community Corner

Skater's Olympic Quest Continues Despite Sandy's Setbacks

Jacki Munzel, 49, qualified for national trials after suffering injuries and displacement after the storm damaged her home.

As Jacki Munzel jogged past refrigerators and other foreign objects along the beach weeks after Hurricane Sandy flooded her West End home, she thought: “If Long Beach can come back, I can come back.”

Still, the 49-year-old speed skater who hopes to make the U.S. Olympic team to compete in Sochi, Russia, in February 2014, recognized that she, her family and their battered Long Beach community faced many barriers on a long road to recovery.

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Immediately after the October storm, Munzel volunteered at the rescue center set up at Long Beach Ice Arena, and she, her husband Michael and their 15-year-old son Thomas vacated their mold-infested Tennessee Avenue home for her in-laws’ house in Baldwin, where they were displaced for 79 days.

“They just took care of us and allowed us to go and do the work we needed to do,” Munzel said of her in-laws.

A former figure skater who made the Olympic trials in 1984 but was sidelined by an eating disorder, Munzel decided three years ago to tie on speed skates and pursue her dreams in a new sport, having raised three children, now ages 15 to 26, and working as a skate instructor. Last year she first competed in the Masters International All-round Games in Germany, placing first in her age group (40-49) in four races and first overall in two races (30 and over).

Despite her post-Sandy trials and tribulations, and after suffering an injured shoulder and torn hip-flexor during intensive training last summer, Munzel returned last month from a series of competitions in which she qualified in all five races for the Olympic trials in Salt Lake City in December. Among U.S. women speed skaters, she ranks 11th in the 5000 meter and 15th in the 3000 meter.

Initially, after her routine life was halted by a hurricane that took her dog, cat and car, Munzel said she contemplated giving up her Olympic quest. She hadn’t really decided to train again until her her coach, Stephen Gough, who coached short-track Olympic gold medalist Apolo Ohno, called her after the storm. Sandy had rendered all area ice arenas inoperable, including Flushing Ice World, where she trains. She returned to the ice there in December, with an eye on the U.S. Nationals competition at Salt Lake City later that month, but she still felt physically and mentally unready.  

“I was talking back and forth with Stephen saying, ‘I’m going to make an idiot out of myself,’” Munzel recalled. “I haven’t been on ice. I haven’t trained. My mind was not in the right place.”

Munzel is use to not getting in enough ice time. Unlike her European counterparts, she trains without access to a regulation-sized oval, the closest of which is in Lake Placid. While she skates on a short track twice weekly, she otherwise trains daily using a Plexiglas slide board that simulates ice, or she performs imagination drills along the shore.

In January, Munzel competed at the Masters International in Milwaukee. The week prior to the event, she got on the ice every day, accompanied by tears. “I was thinking: what am I doing? This is stupid. I left my family. My husband is doing work on the house by himself. I should be home there. My in-laws are dropping my son off at the drop off point [to take a bus to school]; that’s something I should be doing. We’re homeless. This is stupid. I’m chasing a time on a clock.”

But Munzel talked with her husband and they decided to see what a month of competitions would reveal. If her times improved, she would soldier on. If not, she’d hang up her skates for good.

In Milwaukee, she shaved two seconds off her time in the 500 meters and 17 seconds off in the 5,000 meters in the same races from 2012, as well as set a Master world record. Next, she competed in the Master Worlds All-round in Inzell, Germany, where her time dropped six seconds behind in the 3000 meters compared to last year, but she set a Master Worlds record in the 1500 meters, at 2:09, and qualified for the Olympic trials.

In March, at the Master Worlds Sprints in Salt Lake City, she competed against skaters of all age groups and qualified for three more races, cutting into her times in each race.

“So things were going pretty well,” she said.  

A metropolitan association of speed skaters took up a fund for her to pay tuition fees for two competitions. Meanwhile, her sister, Jen Angier, said she is looking to find sponsors that will allow her sister to train daily on ice as the trials near.

“What I was most affraid of was that she was going to lose hope,” Angier said about her sister in the wake of Sandy. “But she allowed people to help her, which is unusual for her.”

When talk turns to Munzel’s chances of making the Olympic team, she is hesitant, sometimes even insistent that she won’t make it. “My times are so far off from that,” Munzel said. “The only thing that I can say is what we’re really basing it on is when I just went to Canada.”

At the Olympic Oval Finale/Canada Cup 4 in Calgary in March, she shaved 14 seconds off her time in the 5000 meters from the same competition in 2012 and qualified for her fifth race in December. Munzel finished at 7:49, but she believes that if not for a hot flash she suffered starting at the seventh of the race’s 15 laps, she may have finished in the 7:30’s.

So where does she truly stand on her chances? Does she believe she can make the Olympic team next December at age 50?

“Not unless I trained every single day and a miracle happened,” she said. “Do I think I’ll be a threat and push some young kids to skate faster? 100 percent.”

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