Mother of all roller skating events returns to Las Vegas

So says Ivanna S. Pankin.

She was there in July 2006, when a corner of the Fremont Street Experience was turned into an impromptu roller derby track where competitors in shiny red bodysuits and camouflaged, G.I. Jane-worthy tank tops — a few of them sporting Luchador masks, because of course — traded blows beneath an afternoon sun as unrelenting as their pistoning arms and legs.

Manholes were covered with cardboard boxes to prevent them from snagging skates. There was no barrier between these hard-charging women and the crowd clustered around them.

“It was crazy, because people would just walk across the track. Like, drunk people would just stumble across the track,” recalls Pankin, whose real name is Denise Grimes. “It was just so weird to play on it, but great.

“We only actually ever had one person break their ankle out there,” she notes. “We all consider that to be, like, a real triumph.”

‘Biggest party of the year’

That was year two of RollerCon, the annual mother of all things roller skating that Grimes co-founded with friend Trish the Dish, the two former Las Vegans having once owned a valley skate shop.

RollerCon has since grown into the biggest event of its kind in the country — a five-day, eight-wheeled marathon of seminars and classes, roller derby scrimmages and bouts, skate park tours and more. It all kicks off Wednesday at the Expo at the World Market Center.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary this go-round, RollerCon now draws thousands of participants from around the world to shine a light on nearly every corner of roller skating culture.

“I think for the roller skating community, RollerCon is basically the biggest party of the year,” says Aylin Woodward, aka Yeti, a New York City native who’s been coming to the event since 2018. “But it’s not a party in the sense of partying — of course, there are parties — but it’s like the biggest mind meld that we have every year. People come from Europe, people come from Australia and just congregate in Vegas and teach each other, play with each other and remind each other that roller derby can be fun in the middle of a hypercompetitive season.

“RollerCon is a really special place,” she adds, “in that a lot of people come from a lot of corners of the world and create a roller skating synergy that’s unparalleled in our community.”

Beauty, grace, a forearm to the face

“It’s really fun to hit people.”

Grimes is explaining roller derby’s tough-nosed appeal.

“That’s not a thing that very many women know, because we just don’t have a lot of contact sports,” she continues. “Just the physicality of it has changed everything about how my life was — and probably ever will be.”

Dating to the 1930s, roller derby is not exclusively a female sport, but it’s long provided one of the few outlets for women to enjoy the exhilaration and camaraderie of full-contact, team-based competition. (Need a quick roller derby primer? It’s played by two teams of five competitors with points scored when a team’s “jammer” skates past opposing blockers. Yes, there will be bruises.)

A veteran of the punk scene, Grimes got hip to the sport through a zine called Roller Derby that she came across while living in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. Ironically, the DIY mag had nothing to do with skating, but it got her thinking about roller derby nonetheless. After relocating to Arizona, she decided to found her own squad.

“I was just like, ‘How hard could it be? I’ll just start a roller derby team,’ ” she recalls. “And so I did, and it kind of ballooned from there. We ended up starting two teams because we didn’t have anyone to play. And then we found an old program from the ’60s and used that to help us figure out rules.

“Roller derby was the first opportunity I really had to spend a lot of time with women,” she continues. “Being involved in the punk rock scene of the ’80s and ’90s was just a really dude-centric sort of a deal, and so coming together with a whole bunch of other really strong women, and all of the collaborations and conflicts and everything that that implies, I was 100 percent in from the first minute.”

Everyone’s welcome

After connecting with other roller derby diehards from across the country via online message boards, Grimes and some friends organized the first RollerCon in 2005, which was basically a group hang with some pool parties, a now-infamous scrimmage in 117-degree heat and a bunch of shows at the Double Down Saloon.

“A lot of really good bands played, but they complained afterwards that nobody was paying any attention to them because all we wanted to do was talk to each other,” Grimes chuckles. “The initial idea was just a chance to get together, and then it turned into more, kind of on its own.”

After stints at the Union Plaza, the Imperial Palace, the Riviera, the Westgate Convention Center and other spots — not to mention a mini-fest in Australia in 2012 — RollerCon relocated in 2023 to the World Market Center, where it now spans multiple tracks, a large vendor area and more, with activities also taking place throughout downtown.

While roller derby was the genesis of the event, it’s come to encompass roller skating in general, from dance to stunt skating, and caters to total pros as well as total novices.

“One of the things that I think is really important about RollerCon is that we’ve always tried to have a really super welcoming atmosphere and really embrace everybody at every level of where they’re at,” Grimes says. “We have this whole framework for people who don’t know anything about anything.

“You can learn how to skate at RollerCon,” she continues. “You don’t have to come already knowing how to play roller derby. You don’t even have to be interested in roller derby, because there (are) all these other kinds of skating, too.”

Speaking of which …

Ridding intimidation factor

Let’s face it, even for ice-water-in-the-veins types, it can be a little nerve-wracking to lace ’em up and hit the skate park for the first time.

For Grimes, this is where RollerCon comes in.

“It’s really hard for people to just go to the skate park on roller skates and figure it out, because they don’t know any of the etiquette, and you have to walk up to a whole bunch of teenage boys and just be like, ‘I’ll blow them out of the way to take my turn,’ ” she says. “That’s scary for an adult woman to do a lot of times.

“So, we put a skate park into RollerCon, and we’re just like, ‘Look, no one’s ever going to give you a hard time here. Come learn it here. Come figure it out here,’ ” she continues. “And then go on the skate park tour and be with 200 other roller skaters, so that it’s not intimidating like that. A lot of RollerCon is trying to take that intimidation factor out.”

All about connections

Since 2007, said skate park tour has been overseen by Las Vegan Jay the Roller Skater, aka Jason Cloetens.

“The community aspect of it is the thing that has drawn me to it from the beginning. I mean, RollerCon is just such an inclusive community,” Cloetens explains. “We are all sort of obsessed about being on eight wheels, whether it’s derby skating, park skating, jam skating. We just love what we do, and we love to see other people having that same level of joy in something that they have passion for.”

And so even though it’s grown in size 50-fold since its start two decades ago, to hear Grimes tell it, the whole point of RollerCon has remained the same ever since they were dodging tourists on Fremont Street.

“The people who are coming to RollerCon are networking and making connections with people that they’re going to know the rest of their lives,” she says. “They’re learning skills — sometimes it’s a specific skating skill — but also learning skills to organize with other people and be part of something bigger than yourself, spend time doing a thing that is meaningful.

“There’s a lot of things that we’ve learned how to do that are convention things, ” she continues. “The important thing that happens with RollerCon happened when we were just in a dirty parking lot in 2005. The connections that people are making with each other is the part that matters.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.