Rolling with the punches

WHITMAN - Watching Joseph Farias dancing on roller skates to Tony Bennett's "Stepping Out," at Carousel Family Fun Center on Sunday morning, I had two thoughts.

The first: This looks like a good way for a working-class kid from Fall River to get beat up.

The second: Roller figure skating? Who knew?

For 20 years, Farias has been lacing up his quads and spending endless hours perfecting his brackets and choctaws to make it to the top of a sport almost nobody knows about.

Ice skaters get to compete in the Olympics. They get big, fancy sponsorship deals. They get a share of millions of dollars in support from the US Olympic Committee.

Roller skaters do everything ice skaters do, except on wheels, and on wood, which hurts like hell when you hit it. And when they reach the top of their sport, they still work full-time day jobs, pack their own wheel bearings, and buy their own plane tickets.

Farias, who recently won his second National Roller Figure Skating Championship, is headed to Taipei in November to compete in the solo dance category at the World Championships.

In Italy, this would make him famous. For some reason, Italians love roller skating. There, championships are televised. Sponsors drop serious money on the sport. But Farias, 27, isn't in Italy.

"I tell people I'm a roller figure skater, and they're like, 'Ice?' and I say, 'No, roller,' and they're like 'Roller?' and I'm like, 'Roller! Same as ice, different equipment,' " he says.

He put on his first pair of skates when he was 7, after seeing skater Tonya Harding jumping triples on the ice and begging his parents to take him to a rink. They ended up at the local roller rink. Not what he had in mind, but he stuck around.

Growing up in what he calls "a pretty rough" part of Fall River, Farias sometimes had trouble conveying to classmates the virtues of the sport to which he had dedicated himself.

"When the other boys are playing with their GI Joes and you're a figure skater, it doesn't go down very well," he explains.

Farias survived school. He says he never got beat up, though there was plenty of name-calling.

His skating career is no less isolating now. A lot of rinks have closed since he was a kid. Roller skating's profile is even lower now.

He crams 20 hours of training around 48-hour workweeks in his Newport, R.I., hair salon.

"Every once in a while I go out with friends, but it takes me two or three days to recover," he says, still catching his breath beside the rink after speeding through 2 minutes and 40 seconds of loops and turns.

There isn't much money for dinners out, anyway. His flashy, crystal-encrusted skating outfits cost $3,000. A pair of good skates runs $2,000. Farias figures he will spend about $15,000 on skating this year.

If he wins a gold medal next month, Farias will get $2,500. Like the other 43 skaters on the national team, Farias is paying his own way to Taipei. He has had to give up his waterfront Newport apartment and move back in with his parents to save money. He is starting a nonprofit to solicit donations to help with his costs.

National roller skating associations have been agitating for years, fruitlessly, to get the sport included in the Olympics. They are shut out, like squash, rugby, and chess. And unless they find a way to make it more telegenic - hello, beach volleyball! - that's how it's likely to stay.

"Sometimes I wonder, 'Should I stay and keep doing this?' " he says. "But when you compete, you perform for all of those people who know what good skating is."

In Taipei, thousands will be watching. So Farias sweats unseen through the hours, living for championships where he is finally surrounded by people who appreciate what he has chosen to do with his life.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com.