'Scary' cracks plagued a Saskatoon ice oval until skaters found this innovative fix decades in the making
Clarence Downey Oval believed to be first to reinforce ice with fibreglass mesh
Saskatoon's prize skating oval has a new lease on ice, thanks to dozens of volunteers, several University of Saskatchewan engineers and a Russian scientist's three-decade-old research.
Fibreglass mesh is now preventing devastating cracks that plagued the Clarence Downey Speed Skating Oval at the Gordie Howe Sports Complex — and it could be the first rink using the material in Canada.
"As far as I know, no one else has done this," said Chris Veeman, a coach with the Saskatoon Lions Speed Skating Club who helped spurred the search for a fix. "It's kind of unique."
Serious cracks started to emerge when the club moved to the oval in 2019, he said. Instead of flooding the ice directly on the grass, like at their previous location, the new oval was frozen on top of plastic barriers to protect the running track underneath.
Some cracks, mostly perpendicular to the direction people skated, were normal, but speed skater Kamaya Makowsky said the new location created more in the direction of travel, making them much more dangerous for athletes and members of the public out on the ice.
"It was kind of scary to skate," said Makowsky, who has been with the club for 12 years. "We'd get our blades stuck sometimes."
The poor ice disrupted the club's training for the Canada Games in Red Deer, Alta., that year, Veeman said. The quest for a solution began.
Early suggestions to mix sawdust with water to stabilize the ice weren't feasible because it would end up on the track, he said.
Then in 2021, Veeman came across a 1993 paper by an engineering professor in St. Petersburg that suggested there was another way.
N.K. Vasiliev found fibreglass mesh or cloth was a "promising material" to increase the flexibility and strength of ice under pressure, according to the peer-reviewed study published in the journal Cold Regions Science and Technology.
Veeman soon approached fellow speed skater Sean Maw, the Huff Chair for Innovative Teaching at the University of Saskatchewan, for help. Maw then spoke with engineering lecturer Glyn Kennell, who tasked a group of first-year students he led with testing different chemical and physical materials to reinforce ice as part of their coursework.
Out of everything tested — from salt to tap water to sawdust — fibreglass was the clear winner, Kennell said.
"When you press on the ice, the tool you're using can still penetrate, but it's no longer as brittle," he said. "It may crack, but it's not going to propagate and expand."
Maw said it works similarly to metal rebar in concrete.
"The rebar is strengthening the overall material and preventing fractures and damages," he said. "Fibreglass is doing the same thing to the ice."
It took more than 160 metre-wide rolls of mesh and around 20 volunteers to lay the material in the middle of the oval's 8,000 square metres of ice for the first time in 2022, said Veeman.
After skating on it for a season and a half, Veeman and Makowsky say it's made a huge difference.
"It has greatly improved the strength of the ice. It used to crack in a spiderweb [pattern]…and those really aren't a problem anymore," Veeman said. "There's still some cracking but it's not falling apart [or] where your skate is going into the ice."
"It's nice and smooth," added Makowsky. "Soft and perfect to skate on."
Potential solution for backyard rinks
Veeman says the fix is helping the ice withstand plummeting temperatures in the lead-up to a meet this weekend.
"The fluctuation of the temperature is quite hard on the ice.… In the past we would have seen a lot of damage, a lot of cracking," said Veeman.
"Now we're pretty confident it's going to survive and there might be a bit of repair work, but on the whole it'll be safe to compete on and pretty fast."
Maw said that while most other ovals won't have the same issues because they aren't on a running track, the findings may come in handy for other public skating areas, backyard rinks and even ice roads.
"The general principle is very interesting for any situation where you don't want ice to fracture," he said. "That could be another layer of safety."
