Stephen Paul Kilari from India goes for gold at the 2018 Olympics
Stephen Paul, now 26 years, was born and raised in Hyderabad in India. He got a passion for skating when he was 8 years old and now he lives in Utah in order to realize his dream by training under the supervision of Derek Parra and Tucker Fredricks. His best times are 36.46 on the 500 meters and 1.11.92 on the thousand meters. He still has a year to improve his records and become the first gold medal winner from India during the winter Olympics as he wishes. Let me show you a bit more about this special person.
Skating in India
It will be clear that one does not start with ice skating in India. The normal way is to get a pair of roller skates as a kid and try it out. That was what Stephen Paul did but he liked it a lot and continued when he was 11 in a club the Lasania´s Roller Skating Academy in Hyderabad. Thanks to the training in this club he won his first gold medals in championships. In 2005 he won a silver and bronze medal in National championships. In 2007 he participated in the world championships inline skating in Colombia and finished under the top 30. At the moment he is the fastest speed skater of India with a record of 26 seconds over 300 meters. Till 2012 he won 56 gold medals. |
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His dream
In 2006 he attended a 10 day ice skating camp supervised by the Austrian Marek Stanuch and got the idea to move to ice speed skating in order to be able to participate in the Olympic games what is still not possible in inline skating. The realization of his dream to participate in the Olympics was not simple because there are only very few places where one can skate on ice in India. He firstly started with short track speed skating and participated in international championships in this sport.
In 2006 he attended a 10 day ice skating camp supervised by the Austrian Marek Stanuch and got the idea to move to ice speed skating in order to be able to participate in the Olympic games what is still not possible in inline skating. The realization of his dream to participate in the Olympics was not simple because there are only very few places where one can skate on ice in India. He firstly started with short track speed skating and participated in international championships in this sport.
Recently he was able to realize a possibility to train long track skating in Salt Lake City under supervision of Derrek Parra, an American inline skater, who changed to ice speed skating to participate in the Olympic games and also won a gold and silver medal in the Olympic games of Salt Lake City on respectively the 1500 and the 5000 meters. He realized also a world record on the 1500 meters. He also gets special training of Tucker Fredricks who is the US record holder on the 500 meters with 34.31 From them Stephen Paul can still learn a lot to improve his chances at the Olympics in 2018. At the short distances he gets already quite close to the world top. I wish him a lot of success with his dream. Below is a video of the 500m race where he improved the national indian record to 36.46.