  We study the pion velocity near the critical temperature $T_c$ of chiral
symmetry restoration in QCD. Using chiral perturbation theory based on hidden
local symmetry (HLS) as an effective field theory, where the chiral symmetry
restoration is realized as the vector manifestation (VM), we show that the pion
velocity for $T \to T_c$ is close to the speed of light, $v_\pi (T) = 0.83 -
0.99$ which is at variance with the sigma model result which predicts $v_\pi
(T_c) = 0$. Our prediction on $v_\pi (T_c)$ is compared with the value
extracted from the recent RHIC data.
