TO the casual visitor, Northbrook, Ill., is just another quiet bedroom community on the outskirts of Chicago. To the 27,000 citizens who live there, it has always been the busy, bristling "Speed-Skating Capital of America." Until recently there may have been some doubters of that heady claim. Not now. Not after two of the town's favorite daughters, Anne Henning and Dianne Holum, skated off with gold medals in the 1972 Winter Games. Indeed, the local Chamber of Commerce has already begun to engrave its stationery with a new slogan: "Speed-Skating Capital of the World."
Why Northbrook? For one thing, there is Ed Rudolph, 60, a onetime high school skating champion who has devoted nearly 20 years to training Northbrook youngsters in his sport. A landscape contractor who also serves as the Northbrook park commissioner, Rudolph began his program by designing baseball diamonds that could be frozen over in the winter for skating. With strong financial and moral support from the townspeople, he has since been instrumental in adding a modern indoor facility that is in operation 24 hours a day throughout the weekends.
Beginning each May, Rudolph's charges spend five months in "dry training": calisthenics, running and bicycling. Then they hit the road for West Allis, Wis., and the only Olympic-sized artificial rink in the U.S. Traveling in a car pool run by their parents, they visit the bleak Wisconsin state fairgrounds every day for six straight months, spending three hours a day on the ice and three hours in transit.
Anne Henning, a cheery, curly-haired blonde who never travels without her lucky Snoopy button and a large supply of peanut butter, does not miss the social life that is ruled out by her training regimen. Says she: "There are lots of boys in the training group too, you know." Dianne Holum, a fiercely dedicated competitor who worked as a waitress last year to help finance a three-month training stint in The Netherlands, adds: "I don't mind the sacrifices. An Olympic gold medal is a life's ambition come true." Even so, the demands are such that many young skaters have to drop out of school and study with a tutor. To pay the $1,000 to $2,000 a year that it takes for the care and feeding of a skater, some Northbrook mothers take part-time jobs. Is it worth it? Anne's father, Bill Henning, thinks so. "The U.S. is the only country in the Northern Hemisphere where speed skating is not a major sport," he explains. "Our hope is to make it one."