By Carl Savard
Photos by Schaats Foto's, Patrick Charbonneau et Carl Savard
Passion/Speed/Skating is now one year old. I still recall talking about this project with my partner Jackob just a few weeks before it took off. We officially launched during the holiday season with a first Facebook post talking about Olivier Jean, an athlete we have had the chance to meet quite a few times and who represents exactly what we wanted to bring into this project: passion. Passion when it comes to short track, long track and inline speed skating.
We thought we would start slowly and we were mainly counting on our love of the sport to make it something fun to do as a father and son project. It grew much faster than we thought, mainly because the athletes and speed skating fans showed interest from the get go. From that first publication on December 26, 2016 to writing this text this morning, here are a few facts representing the efforts we have put in our project.
Even though most of the 88 articles have been written by Jackob and myself (166 when you count that they were all done in french and english, something we are really proud of) other people added their words to our project. Catherine Mailloux wrote an amazing piece in August and helped us many times along the way. Julie Doyon wrote two great articles in the first half of 2017 and recently, Marc-Antoine Caron from Marchands de vitesse started doing gear oriented articles for Passion/Speed/Skating. Thank you!
Our website at passionpvss.com would not be the same without the help of passionate photographers. Especially Tony Chung (@SHORTTRACKHD), Oscar van den Bosch (Schaats Foto's), Martin Holtom and Patrick Charbonneau. Thank you all so much!
We are also writing articles in collaboration with the FPVQ (Quebec’s speed skating federation) this season. This collaboration is something we are really happy about. Thanks François-Olivier Roberge.
We posted on Facebook everyday since the beginning of the project and this week we reached 1000 followers on on the platform. In my mind, after a few months, I was hoping to reach 1000 for the Olympics. I'm happy to see it came faster. We also posted daily on Instagram and have close to 1400 followers. We presently have 66 videos available on our Youtube channel and we will develop it even more in 2018. We are also on Twitter and plan to be more active on it now that we seem to have found a rhythm on the other platforms.
Since we are Canadian boys, it’s normal that Canada comes in first when it comes to pages viewed on our website with about 46% of the 105 762 views, but we have a strong following in the USA, France and the Netherlands. I would like for us to develop Asia in 2018. Dream big!
To be quite frank, Passion/Speed/Skating is the biggest highlight of 2017 for me. Thanks to everyone involved, thanks to the athletes who have been so open and generous and thanks to our loved ones who understood how much this was important for Jackob and I. Finally thanks to YOU, our followers who showed us right away that you want to hear and read more about speed skating in the media. We are celebrating one year today, but it's only the beginning.
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