Every short track skater crashes. It is not a question of if, it is a question of how often and how hard, and most of the time you slide into the pads, get up, laugh it off and rejoin the line. The problem is what happens in the next few minutes. You are full of adrenaline, the coach is already calling the next set, and the last thing on your mind is whether the impact did something to the steel under your feet. So you skate on, and if something did move, you spend the next three sessions wondering why the corner feels wrong before anyone thinks to look at the blade.
This guide is the check you should run every time you hit the boards hard, catch a blade on another skater, or go down at speed. It takes about five minutes with no tools, a little longer if you find something. It is organised from the part most likely to be damaged to the part least likely, and it tells you what a problem looks like, what a problem feels like on the ice, and what to do about it. Our guide to reading blade setup symptoms covers what to do when the feeling arrives without an obvious cause. This one is for when you already know the cause, because you just watched it happen.
Why a crash is different from ordinary wear
Ordinary wear is slow and even. A blade loses steel gradually, a boot packs out over months, bolts creep loose a fraction of a turn at a time. You can manage all of that with a routine. A crash is a single, sharp load applied in a direction the equipment was never designed to take. A short track blade is built to be loaded downward and sideways into the ice through the whole length of the tube. It is not built to have the tip driven into a pad at forty kilometres per hour, or to have another skater's boot land across it.
The other difference is that crash damage is often invisible from a normal standing position. A blade that has taken a hit can look perfectly straight from above and still be out of true by enough to matter, because the bend is tiny and the effect on the ice is magnified by the length of the steel and the speed you carry into a corner. That is why this check is about looking from specific angles and comparing left to right, rather than just glancing down at your feet.
Step one: sight the blade for a bend
Take the skate off. Hold it with the blade pointing away from you at eye level, tip furthest from your face, and look straight along the length of the steel as if you were sighting down a rifle. A straight blade shows you a single clean line. A bent blade shows you a line that curves or kinks somewhere along its length, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Now turn the skate over and repeat with the boot pointing up, so you are looking along the running edge. Then look from the tip end. Do the same for the other skate, because you need the undamaged one as a reference. Short track blades are already bent slightly toward the inside of the corner on purpose, so what you are looking for is not the presence of a bend but a difference between the two blades, or a sharp change of direction at one point rather than a smooth curve along the whole length.
A short track blade is meant to carry a smooth bend. What you are hunting for after a crash is a sharp kink, or a curve that no longer matches the other skate.
What a bent blade feels like
A blade with a new kink near the tip tends to grab on corner entry, because the front of the steel is now pointing somewhere your foot is not. A kink near the heel usually shows up as the blade catching or squirming on the exit. A blade bent along its whole length in the wrong direction, which happens when a skate is landed on sideways, makes the corner feel as if one foot is fighting the other. If any of those feelings appeared for the first time right after a fall, trust the timing.
Can a bent blade be saved
Sometimes. Short track blades are bent on purpose in a proper bending tool, and a small change can often be corrected the same way by someone who knows what they are doing. What cannot be fixed at home is a kink in the tube or a crack. Do not try to straighten steel by hand or in a vice. You will almost certainly overshoot, and a blade that has been bent back and forth has been weakened at exactly the point you worked on. If a blade will not sight straight and you cannot get to a bending tool, that is when to talk to us about a replacement, and our guide on when to replace short track blades covers the decision in detail.
Step two: check the tube, the lips and the welds
A short track blade is a runner of steel held in an aluminium tube, joined to the boot through the lips at each end. The steel usually survives a crash. The tube and the lips are where impact damage hides. Run a fingertip along the top of the tube feeling for any dent or flat spot, then look closely at the point where each lip meets the tube. You are looking for hairline cracks, paint that has flaked in a line, or any daylight between parts that used to be flush.
Flexible blades deserve a particularly careful look here. The StayBent JaeBee is built with highly flexible lips and a tube that tapers from the centre toward each end to give a progressive flex along the blade. That design is exactly what makes it feel so connected through a corner, and it also means the lips do a lot of work on every stride, so after a hard board contact you want to confirm they are still doing that work cleanly. Flex the blade gently by hand and watch the lips. They should move smoothly and return. Any click, any creak, or any hesitation is a reason to stop and inspect properly rather than skate through it.
Step three: the mount, the cups and the bolts
This is the part most skaters skip, and it is the part most often actually responsible for the post crash wobble. The blade attaches to the boot through mounting cups, and the whole system is held by bolts through the boot sole. A sideways hit to a blade puts a huge lever on those bolts. They do not usually snap. What they do is shift by a fraction of a turn, or let the cup rotate a degree or two on the sole, and now your carefully set lateral position and pitch have moved without you touching anything.
Sit the skate on a flat surface and try to move the blade relative to the boot with your hands. Push it sideways, twist it, rock it front to back. There should be no movement and no noise at all. Then look at each cup from the side and check that it sits flat and square to the sole with no gap under one edge. Cups such as the StayBent Short Track Mounting Cups are machined from 6061 aluminium billet so they are stiff enough not to deform in a crash, but a stiff cup transfers the load to the bolt instead of absorbing it, which is another reason to check the hardware rather than assume it is fine.
If your setup uses an adapter plate between a 195 mm boot pattern and 165 mm blade spacing, such as the StayBent EHS Short Track Adapter Set, you have two bolted joints instead of one, so check both. Check the plate to the boot, then the cup to the plate.
The blade and the boot rarely break in a crash. The joint between them is where things quietly move, and it is the easiest thing to check.
Do not just tighten and go
If a bolt has moved, the cup has probably moved with it. Tightening the bolt in its new position locks in a setup you did not choose. Before you snug anything down, put the two skates side by side and compare lateral blade position, the gap at the toe and the heel, and how the blade sits against the cup walls. Return the cup to where it was, then tighten. If you keep a note of your setup, and you should, this is the moment it pays for itself.
Check the bolts themselves too. EHS boots ship with four M6 by 16 hexagon bolts and four M6 rings for attaching blades, and that hardware is the right size for the job. A bolt that has been stretched or whose head has rounded during a hurried retightening is a bolt to replace, not reuse.
Step four: the boot
Carbon boots are strong in the direction they are meant to be loaded and brittle when loaded wrong. After a crash that involved another skater's blade or a hard corner of the pads, look at the shell for cracks, especially around the mounting bolts on the sole and around the ankle cuff. Press the shell with your thumbs at a few points and listen. A sound shell is silent. A cracked shell clicks.
The EHS Short Track Boots use a carbon fibre and Diolene shell that can be heat moulded, which is part of why they fit so well once set up. That same heat moulding process is worth remembering after a crash, because a shell that took a hard knock while warm from a session can occasionally settle into a slightly different shape. If your heel suddenly lifts or a pressure point appears where there was none, and it started after a fall, the boot may simply need a fitter to re mould it rather than anything more drastic.
Check the laces and eyelets as well. A blade passing across a boot in a pile up will cut a lace cleanly and can tear an eyelet. Neither is dangerous in itself, but a lace that has been nicked will fail at the worst possible moment, so replace it rather than knotting it.
Step five: the helmet and protective kit
This is the check that matters most and gets done least. If your head touched the pads, the boards or the ice with any real force, look at the helmet before you look at anything else. A hard shell over an impact absorbing liner, which is how the StayBent Short Track Speed Skating Helmet and most modern short track lids are built, works by letting the liner crush to absorb energy. Once it has crushed it does not recover, and a helmet with a compressed liner has already used up the protection it was going to give you.
Look for cracks in the shell, dents, and any place where the liner has separated from the shell or feels softer than the area next to it. Check the strap anchors. If the helmet took a proper impact, replace it even if it looks fine. That is not a sales line, it is how the material works.
Then look at your cut resistant kit. Run your hands over the suit, neck guard, socks and gloves feeling for any cut or opened weave, especially anywhere you remember contact with a blade. Cut resistant fabric that has been cut is no longer cut resistant at that point. Our guide to caring for cut resistant kit covers what to do with a damaged piece.
Run the checks in this order every time. If your head hit anything, do step five first.
Back on the ice: the confirmation lap
If everything checks out, skate two or three easy laps before you rejoin the set and pay attention to the corners on both feet. Any new feeling, however small, that was not there before the crash is worth stopping for. The check above finds most problems but not all of them, and the ice will tell you about the rest. Skaters who do this consistently find that the mystery setup faults they used to chase for weeks nearly always trace back to a fall nobody thought to check after.
Keep a small kit in your bag for exactly this. The Allen key for your cups, a spare pair of laces, and a marker or your phone notes with your setup measurements. The StayBent Short Track Accessories collection has the cups, adapters and hardware if you find something that needs replacing rather than retightening.
Frequently asked questions
Do I really need to check after every fall?
After a slide into the pads at moderate speed with no blade contact, a quick look at the blade and a wiggle of the mount is enough and takes thirty seconds. After a hard board hit, a pile up, or anything where another skater's blade was involved, do the full check. The cost of skipping it is a setup fault you spend weeks chasing.
My blade looks straight but the corner feels wrong since I fell. What now?
Check the mount first, because a cup that has rotated slightly changes lateral position and pitch without the blade itself bending at all. Compare both skates side by side. If the mount is solid and matched, sight the blade again from the tip end and from below, because a small bend hides well from some angles.
Can I straighten a bent short track blade myself?
Not by hand and not in a vice. Small corrections belong in a proper bending tool, ideally with the person who set the blade up in the first place. A kinked tube or a crack cannot be repaired safely and the blade should be retired.
The helmet has no visible damage. Do I still need to replace it?
If your head took a real impact, yes. The liner does its job by crushing, and crushed liner does not always show from the outside. A helmet that has absorbed one hard hit has less to give on the next one.
How do I know where the cups were before the crash?
Ideally from notes you made when the blades were set up. If you do not have notes, use the undamaged skate as a reference for lateral position and the toe and heel gap, and make the notes now so you have them next time.
The short version
Sight the blade for a kink or a mismatch between skates. Feel the tube and flex the lips listening for anything that is not silent. Wiggle the blade against the boot and look for a gap under a cup, and if a bolt has moved, reset the cup before tightening it. Check the boot shell for cracks and clicks. If your head hit anything, retire the helmet. Then skate an easy lap and listen to what the ice tells you. Five minutes after a crash saves weeks of chasing a fault that was never in your technique.
