In-Line Skater Completes His 3-Year, Globe-Circling Tour de Force

Still on a roll after nearly three years and 15,000 miles, Fabrice Gropaiz coasted to a stop Thursday on the Santa Monica Pier to end a trip around the world on in-line skates.

The 28-year-old Frenchman, who undertook the unique journey to raise money for AIDS research, chronicled his trip for thousands of readers by filing periodic updates and photographs on the Internet.

He borrowed strangers’ computers along the way to tell of encounters with rattlesnakes in Texas, wolves in Mongolia and police in China who arrested him for skating through “a forbidden zone.”

The last leg of his odyssey began Thursday in Oxnard and took him through Malibu, where other skaters who have been following his exploits by computer joined him.

Among them was Dorothee Rippmann, a 26-year-old German who is Gropaiz’s fiancee.

Rippmann met Gropaiz while they were staying at a Venice youth hostel a few days before his April 29, 1996, departure from Los Angeles. She followed him on the Internet before catching up with him in Europe and again in Asia.

The Web site was organized by a San Jose software engineer whom Gropaiz met while skating.

“For the best effect, read with a slight French accent :-),” advised computer operator David Lai, who by Thursday afternoon had tallied 11,400 readers of Gropaiz’s travelogue.

Gropaiz was in far better shape after the final leg of his trip than he was on his first. That day he covered 80 miles, making it to San Clemente.

“When I took off my skates, it was like a great feeling,” he wrote in the fractured English that his friends would come to appreciate. “But I walked more like a robot than a dancer. In this circumstances you know was is totally appreciate a hot shower and a good bed.”

Skating briefly into northern Mexico, Gropaiz reported that he was wearing out several sets of skate brakes a day speeding down hills until he figured out how to use ski poles to slow himself.

“I also felt for the first time the risk of death,” he wrote. “First it was more than 100 degrees F in the shade, second I was on a really mountain with very dangerous roads with huge trucks. And every turn you could see burned cars from former crashes on this road. And there are also along the road crosses, which marked people who had died in accidents.”

In Texas, Gropaiz was forced to skate near the center of the roadway “to avoid snakes and scorpions.” Sleeping was another challenge: “That is why I had sometimes to establish my tent on a picnic table!!! Other wise they were too much risk to be visited by rattlesnakes.”

What he had envisioned as an 18-month jaunt nearly doubled in time when cold weather forced him to return to his home near Paris for two winters. While there, he worked in a sporting goods store to help raise the $30,000 that his trip ended up costing.

He spent the spring and summer of 1997 skating through Europe. “Holland is a skate paradise . . . you could cross the entire country on a bicycle road,” he e-mailed that July. He found roads in bad shape in the former East Germany and food expensive in Russia before winter weather sent him scurrying by plane back to Paris.

He picked up where he left off in May 1998, passing through Moscow and heading toward Mongolia and China--where he skated on the Great Wall.

“I had thousands of difficulties: languages, administration, border, roads, etc,” Gropaiz e-mailed in October from Beijing.

“In Mongolia a wolf attacked the camp. There was an ice storm, one earthquake (my first). . . . No electricity, no water, no legumes, no fruits, etc. In China we get arrested and we waited the answer of the Datong tribunal, they show us English book and we could have been put in jail up to 10 days because we were riding in the forbidden zone. We stayed one day at the police station and one night at military hotel under close observation.”

Footage from home videos Gropaiz made during that part of the trip was later added to the www.worldskate.com site.

“It’s amazing he got through what he did. There’s footage of him on rocks and mud,” Lai said.

Gropaiz said he is uncertain how much money he helped raise for AIDS research. In the United States, he urged supporters to donate to AIDS groups in Dallas and San Francisco.

But after wearing out 20 sets of in-line skate wheels, he’s ready for a new line of work.