Short track skating in Israel started in the middle of the nineties, when Coach Boris Drabkin started a short-track programme at the Canada Centre, Metulla, and invited Olga Danilov from the Ukraine to make aliya. Olga had represented Israel in international short-track competitions for several years, including the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City where she placed 17th overall. She was also in the top 10 of European Short Track Championships for several competitive seasons. In the men’s category, Denis Zaslavsky, who also made aliya from the Ukraine, represented Israel internationally between the years of 1999 and 2004. His best achievements were a 6^th place finish at the 2000European Championships (1500m) and 11^th place finish at 2003 World Championships (1000 m). Denis was coached by his parents, Vera and Gregory Zaslavsky. The short track school at the Canada Centre became very popular in the late 90s fostering a “stable” of young athletes, among them Vladi Bykanov, Alex Seleznov, Lena Kaplan, Valeriya Postrigan, and a few others. However, the quality of ice at the Canada Centre has plummeted in the recent years, likely to cause injuries if training continued, which compelled us to shift our team overseas to enable them to prepare for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. We offered all the 9 skaters that until recently were making up the short-track team to relocate to Calgary, but not all of them were able to make this obligation. The top two skaters, Vladi Bykanov and Alex Seleznov moved to the Olympic Oval Center in Calgary in April 2009 to train under Coach Jeroen Otter (Vladi) and coaches Alan McIlveen and Yoka Kamino (Alex) as part of their international Olympic preparation programme.

Please, check out on the item about Vladi and Alex’s summer 2009 training in Calgary.