Georgia W. Tush owns a sports store. Brim Stone is a biology grad who minored in English. 8Mean Wheeler has four kids, three dogs, a tank of fish and a fire-bellied toad.

They are Team Canada members — in ripped stockings, old-school skates, face paint and leopard-print skivvies — who race, bodycheck and occasionally, get tossed by officials for rough conduct.

It all happens on concrete, unless skaters crash into trackside beeramids that cushion tumbles with empty suds cans.

The inaugural World Cup of women’s flat-track roller derby comes to Toronto on Thursday, so hold on to your helmet panties (stay with us here). A jammer like Calgary’s Gunpowder Gertie — who once weighed 260 pounds — could land in your lap if you’re brave enough to sit in the “suicide seats.”

After the World Cup? These rolleristas want to land in the Olympics.

“It is a really aggressive sport and we are athletes,” says 29-year-old Kayla Wilkins — a.k.a. Brim Stone, a Team Canada co-captain who hopes an Olympic Games gig is in her derby future.

“You need your body to be in really good shape to prevent injuries.”

Just five-foot-one and not quite 120 pounds, the lithe Haliburton, Ont., skater will block for Team Canada’s point-scoring jammers like Gertie — identified as a jammer by the removable mesh helmet “panty” with a star on it — while trying to impede rival jammers.

“I’m pretty small, especially for roller derby, but I can hold my own,” says Wilkins, whose injuries have included bruises, abrasions and muscle pulls.

Canada is one of 13 World Cup countries (yes, 13 — it’s not a typo) competing for derby dominance in The Bunker at Downsview Park. The former munitions warehouse is large enough for two tracks — each oval and about the size of a hockey pad — to run simultaneous hour-long “bouts” split into 30-minute halves.

The grandstand and the aforementioned suicide seats at smack level hold about 1,500 spectators. Organizers report the four-day competition is sold out, tickets priced from $20 to $125 plucked clean a week before the start.

Roller derby is probably best remembered from its raucous 1970s television days. Crowds howled with delight when fist-fights, hits from behind and over-the-railing body tosses peppered action on the steeply banked tracks. Raquel Welch added big-screen cleavage to track lore as “the hottest thing on wheels” when she starred in the 1972 movie Kansas City Bomber.

Today, the four-wheeled skates and passion for nicknames remain — but little else from 40 years ago.

Fights are rare. Bouts are streamed over the Internet. Even the tracks have changed. Most amateur floors are flat, a cheaper way to keep the game going when existing spaces like dry hockey rinks are used.

“We’re working on a different rule set now,” says Junkie Jenny, the president of Toronto Roller Derby (ToRD). She’s also Jennifer Watson, the 33-year-old manager of donor relations for the World Wildlife Fund Canada.

“I’d say the difference between the eras is like Greco-Roman wrestling and WWE.”

Roller derby, which has been around for men as well as women in various forms since the 1930s, began a vigorousrevival in Toronto a decade ago.

Women keen to form teams started skating in church basements, on school parking lots and at bare arena rinks until hockey’s refrigeration pipes cranked up in late summer. Word of mouth swelled the ranks, with students, career women and mothers — many of whom had never played team sports before — getting involved.

“I couldn’t even stand at first, I fell all over the place,” recalls Wilkins, who as a York University student tried at the urging of her friend, Dust Bunny. “It was so embarrassing.

“But roller derby sounded so cool. I just wanted to get involved and challenge myself.”

In the early years, skaters simply joined a team. Now, tryouts are necessary.

ToRD was one of several local leagues. It now has about 120 skaters for four club teams — including Wilkins’ Gore Gore Rollergirls (named after a “very terrible” horror movie, she says), a farm system and a travelling all-star squad called CN Power. Like most organizations under the governance of the US-based Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, ToRD is owned and operated by its players.

“Every participant is a shareholder,” says Watson, who blocks for the Gore Gore team.

“We’re not paying dividends and I don’t think that’s our long-term goal, either. We’re just creating skating opportunities for ourselves. If we ever do start turning a profit, we’d probably hire staff to do the work we’re all doing on a volunteer basis now.”

Players pay to play.

It costs ToRD members about $50 in monthly dues to cover practice times. Insurance is $50 annually. Gear — helmet, mouthguard, elbow pads, wrist pads, knee pads, skates — is next. A “fresh meat” starter kit is about $300; upgraded equipment puts it closer to $500.

“We skate on our own time, on our own dime,” Wilkins says.

Well, sometimes fans kick in a few bucks.

ToRD charges $12 per adult, $18 at the door. Amie “Speedin Hawking” Sergas, the league’s public relations and marketing director, says typical crowds at The Bunker range from 500 to 1,000 people.

Skaters hope that in establishing regular World Cup competition, roller derby will gain credibility in the mainstream sporting culture — and possibly Olympic inclusion.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Canadian World Cup coach Pauly Perez started a women’s league a decade ago in his native Arizona. He also married one of the league’s players — Canadian Dee Vicious, known as nurse Denise Breeuwsma in her day job — and moved to Edmonton, where the couple are raising two young daughters.

Perez says the pioneering successes of roller hockey and roller figure skating at international multi-sport events will also help build a case to secure an Olympic berth for derby.

“The sport is definitely rising to a point where we could get Olympic status,” says Perez. The 38-year-old IT professional, who has coached internationally for 10 years, notes more than 500 women’s flat-track leagues in the United States and upwards of 70 in Canada exist.

“That’s what we’re trying to do with this World Cup, elevate knowledge of the sport and get folks who don’t know about it out there.”

Mainstream acceptance, however, would likely cost the sport some of its sassy sense of fun.

At the elite level, cheeky nicknames are starting to be spurned, a movement gaining momentum in Denver as players try to shed derby’s junk-sport stereotype.

Clothing is on the block too. Team Canada’s World Cup kit will be tame T-shirts and shorts — though Perez guesses a there may be a few pairs of wild tights underneath “just to add some spice.” Most other teams will have a similar shorts-and-jersey look.

“Even if I’m wearing a leopard-print bathing suit, it doesn’t make me feel any less of an athlete,” says Wilkins, who is playing and coaching full time in Toronto, Haliburton, Orillia and Barrie.

“But for Team Canada, it’s shorts, shirt, red and white. I like that too.”

Then, there’s face paint. Not everyone lacquers up, but some daub on blood, tears or menacing images.

Even Perez admits the current state of roller derby would be “a hard sell” to International Olympic Committee members — not a group likely to guffaw at a beeramid crash or names like Joan Cougar Menstrualcramp.

What is undeniable, says Perez, is the athleticism required. Points are scored when jammers pass opposing players during “jam” shifts that can last two minutes — a long time to be skating hard with 10 players fighting for position.

An ESPN magazine photo of a naked-but-for-skates Suzy Hotrod, one of the stars on the powerful U.S. team, shows just how muscled a derby jammer can be. She is coming to The Bunker.

Modern competitive skaters work with nutritionists, cross-train, weight train, follow plyometric exercises and boost cardio capacity by running or endurance skating. That’s in addition to the four to six nights a week the Canadian team skaters log while training on the track.

During a two-hour workout Monday night, Wilkins and her Gore Gore teammates were breathless and sweating after interval drills. Then they scrimmaged the Smoke City Betties, running rolling jams — those chaotic scoring sessions after which the helmet panty is passed to a fresh jammer.

Georgia W. Tush is Thunder Bay native Alyssa Kwasny. The 27-year-old owns the derby-centric Neon Skates store in Montreal and will pull double duty at the World Cup: she’s a national team player and an on-site vendor.

“I’ve pretty much dedicated my life to derby at this point,” says Kwasny, a Concordia political science and history grad.

“It’s my hobby, it’s my job, it’s my passion — it’s all derby, 24/7. Sometimes I dream about it.”

This week, The Bunker might be the first stop on the way to the roller derby’s grandest dream — fishnets atop an Olympic podium.

Surely, somewhere, Games founder Baron “Five Nipple Rings” de Coubertin is smiling.