Speed skater Blake Skjellerup gets married in Hawaii
Olympic speed skater Blake Skjellerup has swapped his lycra body suit for a tux to marry partner Saul Carrasco in Hawaii.
A year after announcing their engagement, the 30-year-old athlete, who represented New Zealand at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, has revealed via social media that he and Carrasco had celebrated a Hawaiian summer wedding earlier in the month. The pair got engaged in August last year.
Skjellerup told Out Magazine back in April that the pair had met while he was visiting New York City.
“Saul and I had been talking on Instagram and I reached out and asked him if he’d like to go to dinner and show me around the city,” he said.
“We went for dinner and we hit it off. Afterwards we kept in touch and ended up meeting each other again in Las Vegas a few weeks later. We decided then that we’d like to be in a relationship.”
Carrasco, a lifestyle blogger originally from Texas, told Out that Hawaii was the perfect destination for the wedding.
“It’s a half-way point for our families,” he said.
“We want it to be less of a stuffy wedding and more of a vacation for everyone.”
Skjellerup came out four months after competing in the 2010 Olympics where he finished 16th. He risked arrest and deportation at last year’s Sochi Winter Olympics by wearing a rainbow pin to show his supported for a heavily discriminated Russian LGBT community.
Had he not failed to qualify by one spot in the 500 metre qualifier, Skjellerup have been the only gay athlete at those Olympics.
Words by TROY NANKERVIS