Barbara and
Maurizio:
GOLDEN
ANGELS
Good
things were already in the air! Two weeks earlier I had been to the
Italian National Championships that were held in my hometown, Milan
: they used the new costumes for the freedance for the first time,
and they skated wonderfully; They earned some amazing marks - and
even if we knew that in an international competition they wouldn't
score so high, we hoped that it was a sign for very good marks at
Europeans too:
5.9 5.9 6.0 6.0 5.8 5.9 6.0 5.8 6.0
6.0 6.0 6.0 6.0 6.0 6.0 6.0 6.0 6.0
This is a not so good pic of the podium for the senior ice dance competition.
Valentina
Anselmi, Fabrizio Pedrazzini, Barbara, Maurizio, Gloria Agogliati,
Luciano Milo.
Diary of my very short
trip to the European Championships
Part one: the trip, and
then Bratislava: Friday afternoon and night, before the last group
of skaters
I left
Milan on Thursday night, for a 15-hours trip which would have brought
me first to Wien and then to the Slovak capital. Luckily at least this
time I was traveling by night, so I hoped to be able to sleep a little,
to make the travel a bit shorter! After a little misunderstanding when
my ticket was taken away leaving Milan  (I
just didn't know that it was supposed to be returned to me the next
morning, and that it was perfectly normal... I was quite scared for
a couple of minutes before I found the nerve to ask!) There was quite
a lot of time to wait in Wien, but I was so tired that it didn't matter.
On the train to Bratislava our tickets and passports were checked twice,
both by the Austrian authorities and the Slovak ones... it was definitely
frustrating to be so close to the final destination (it was the next
stop) and not moving!
After getting to Bratislava I soon discovered that there was another
not so little challenge to face: not only I couldn't understand a word
of the local language, but it was also difficult to find people who
could speak English!!
This
is the little piece of paper that I carried in my wallet all the
time to show to the taxi drivers - I asked the woman at the reception
in my hotel to write on it the name of my destination: the "ICE
ARENA".
I got in the Ondrej Nepela's ice rink when the ladies'short
program scheduled for the afternoon had already started... and the
Italian fans were warming up for the night cheering for our girls
on the ice, Silvia and Vanessa. We had flags, banners with all kinds
of designs and writings all around the arena, signs of "6.0", bells,
whistles and anything we could think of!! The French crowd was large
and very well organized, but we were definitely making a lot of noise!!
Our girls skated pretty well, finishing tenth and fourteenth... not
bad at all, and there was still room for improvement.
The flag with
the big golden heart is the one I made ! Barbara's mum liked it a
lot ( and this is definitely something I'm proud of!)
After
the end of the ladies' short pr we remained inside the arena waiting
for the event that we were waiting for so anxiously: the Dance Final.
There it came the first shock: even the places that we had been using,
the ones reserved to the athletes and anyone else who had a pass instead
of a ticket had been sold for the night, and we had to leave them
and get back to the places that we actually owned... disaster!!! Barbara's
parents were already busy calculating where everyone had to sit to
recreate the same disposition they had during the original dance,
when we all had to move. 
At 18:30 the competition was beginning, and we found ourselves all
scattered across the arena, while the French supporters were all reunited
in a couple of rows in front of the judges. I honestly have to admit
that I don't remember a lot of the competition, because we were all
too nervous and already thinking about Barbara & Maurizio and Marina
& Gwendal... They were going down in the last group, three hours after
the beginning of the competition, a very long time to wait!
Anyway, we had two more couples going down on the ice in the dance
final, so we could concentrate a little on their performance and warm
up cheering for them. They skated well, finishing in fifteenth (Gloria
Agogliati & Luciano Milo) and twentieth place (Valentina Anselmi &
Fabrizio Pedrazzini)
At around 21:15 there was the final resurfacing of the ice, right
before the last group of skaters.
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