Name: Claire Browne
Lives: Melbourne
Skate Style: All sorts! Inline slalom, roller dance, park skating
Instagram: @claeribrowne
How did first get into skating?
I think the first skates I ever had were some bright pink, plastic barbie roller skates that you strapped to your shoes that I got for my 5th birthday!
I then moved on to a pair of rec skates and skated back and forth on the veranda afterschool for years and years. I basically did this more or less until I was introduced to slalom skating about 10 years ago through Bayside!
What types of skating do you like to do?
All of them!
I’m really enjoying discovering al the different ways to express yourself on wheels! And I love converting what I know to new setups and skates to see how I can bring a unique style!
I was a dedicated slalom skater for a good number of years, competing in local and international comps, working obsessively to be as good as I could be! After competing at Worlds in Nanjing China in 2017, I’d achieved that goal and started to reach out for other avenues of skating!
A couple of months spent running an ice rink in the cbd in 2019 and 2021 gave me a love of the speed of ice skating, discovering a little ice freestyle, and giving me a really good understanding of how momentum and resistance can vary and be utilised!
Last year I got given some Impalas to try out for the FEW studio jam skating video comp and won best edit!! I’m really proud of that clip, produced during lockdown with my housemate, it really set the tone for what I wanted to be doing creatively from then on! I then got some Jackson Mystiques from Bayside and I’m
addicted to the jammy, low centre and hip hop style of roller skating, and the rush of park skating.
The Few Roller skate Open Entry
What inspires you?
I’ve been skating for so long, sometimes it feels like I have a force in my body that is a need to skate! If I go too long without skating I can feel it building up in my muscles and heart! I get anxious and my head feels foggy! The feeling of releasing that energy is one of my favourites in the world!
I’m really inspired by dancers, and trying to access movements that exist outside of the habitual, and speak to something unexpressed, like finding new words to describe something you’ve always felt. I think seeing skating and movement as a form of language allows me to find inspiration in so many places! I love to think about the way birds move and communicate through dance, and how their displays can be so unique and left field that you can’t look away!
How did you get involved with Bayside Blades?
I think I had been teaching myself a couple of basic tricks on my old rec skates that were falling apart and decided that an upgrade was a good 16th birthday present, so Mum took me along to Bayside Blades. Not at all sure what I was
after, I explained what kind of skating I did to an old staff member, Henri, who suggested slalom skating to me! The team gave me a heap of links to cool slalom videos, set me up with some Seba FR1’s and some cones and told me all about Slalom Sunday’s at the Melbourne Museum! I went home and basically watched the whole set of Seba profile videos and just knew that was what I wanted to do! From then on skating’s become my whole life and I’m so grateful!
Skate Set up:
I’m currently riding a few things!
My inline setup is my custom red seba wsfc’s with a 243mm pre rocker frame and FR street invaders! I also sometimes skate my FR Igors because I love the ankle support and responsiveness they have, where the wsfc’s give me flexibility!
For quads I’m Jackson mystiques! I’m about to get them fitted with a new, shorter frame to give me more responsiveness and agility, to match the skate style I’ve developed from slalom! I’m also about to get some luminous wheels which I’m so excited about rocking as summer wanes and it gets darker!
Favourite Skater
I have so so many but I absolutely can’t go past Igor Cheremetieff! I think his 2010 profile video was the first slalom video I ever watched and I knew straight away that I wanted to skate like him! I can’t even count how many times I’ve watched that video.
IGOR CHEREMETIEFF’ ,profil 2010
More recently I’ve been so inspired by the Detroit skate scene, with their tiny wheels, incredible spins and joyous collaborative skating!
Another big inspiration is Chloe Seyres, who also went from high level slalom skating to quad dancing and has been a huge inspiration to how slalom experience can give you a really cool quad style!
I basically have a soft spot for anyone who looks like they’re enjoying their skating! Expressive and creative skaters, particularly those with a lot of energy!
Other interests:
I always have a thousand little creative endeavours going, particularly enjoying drawing and painting native birds and chickens with watercolour! I also live with chickens, bunnies and a parrot to always keep me occupied! I’m about to go back to uni to try and finish my agriculture degree, with ambitions for a career in sustainable food production.