Flat feet and a tinker’s mind led a Calgary graduate student to open a promising business building high-tech speed skates for this year’s Olympic superstars.

Gold medallist Catriona Le May Doan streaked around the 500-metre track in Salt Lake City wearing a pair of Scott Van Horne’s shiny, custom skates, as did five other top-10 contestants in the same race.

In the men’s 500-metre speed skating event, seven of the top 10 racers laced up in Van Horne’s high-tech wonders.

But the advancements the 25-year-old University of Calgary bio-mechanics student has made in the normally staid craft of skate-building will pale in comparison to what he hopes to achieve in the future.

Van Horne is in Utah working on a grant from the International Olympic Com-mittee’s Medical Commission to study the critical push-off speed skaters use in their standing starts at this year’s races.

He has a series of high-speed, digital cameras set up around the Olympic ice track that are focused on the skaters in the hopes of unravelling some of the secrets of a tiny but critical aspect of modern-day speed skates – the free floating rear end of the skate blade.

Scott Van Horne

The front of a modern speed skate blade is hinged to allow the unattached back of the blade to float free, Van Horne explained.

As a result, more power is transferred from the skater’s knee to the skate on takeoff than the racers would get if using the old-style, fixed blades.

Van Horne hopes his cameras will unlock even more secrets of the power phenomenon, the results of which will benefit skaters around the world and allow Van Horne to build an even better skate.

“It’s neat to be here and go to the events and see what it is really like,” he said. “It’s amazing, in fact.”

The fame he has won in speed-skating circles over the years and the successes skaters have had this year with his hardware will allow the young entrepreneur to up the prices of his skates from the current base price of about $600 US per pair.

“You are not going to make a fortune making speed skates, because it is such a small market, but right now I’ve got a real corner on it, and I’m doing quite well,” Van Horne said.

Last year, he sold 50 pairs of skates, all of which have a distinctive shiny cover.

The cover is made of a polyurethane-coated spandex that wraps completely over the boots to keep the laces from flopping out – so skaters don’t trip – and to improve the aerodynamic quality of the boots.

To build the skates, Van Horne takes a mould of each skater’s foot and refines that mould by hand to gain maximum, bio-mechanical performance from each foot.

“You can make the skates sleeker, you can make them lighter, and, when speed skating is your whole life, it is worth it to pay the extra to get the added advantages,” he said.

His skates today are light years away from the first prototype that took him five years to build.

Van Horne started speed skating when he was four and was an accomplished racer himself when at age 14 he decided to try to build a skate to overcome the painful effects of flat feet.

“I always had a curiosity about how things worked and it just went from there.” His curiosity is pushing him to expand his business into custom-built hockey and figure skates, plus cyclist’s shoes.

But expansion of his company, called VH Inc., will have to wait until his master’s thesis is completed within the next year.

“It will be another celebration time then,” Van Horne said.