Barbara and Maurizio:

GOLDEN ANGELS

Part four: Saturday Afternoon's final, Athletes Leaving for the Banquet and Coming Back

I got the pics!!! All these belong to my friend Marianna Goggi - she took them for me while my camera was lost!

The next day we got up around noon, and soon we were back at the arena for the ladies' final... after we could find a taxi, that is, as it seems that the bus we had managed to catch on Friday was not circulating during the week end: we waited for three different ones (according to the timetables) but no one passed, so we had to walk back to the hotel to look for a taxi.
Originally I wasn't supposed to attend this event, as I had not the ticket, but very kindly Vanessa Giunchi's mom gave me hers, as she could get in with her pass; the same thing happened for my roommate, who got her ticket from Fabrizio Pedrazzini's mom.
We met with the others in the arena, and we decided to leave our places and find some empty seats somewhere else in the arena to stay together... this ended up with us sitting in the last two rows of the tribunes, so high that the girls were difficult to follow!
Not that I would have been very interested in the competition anyway: I couldn't really concentrate on the programs because I had just found out that my camera was not in my backpack anymore, and I was extremely worried and sad... all the pics of the previous night were still in, and if I wasn't to find it soon I wouldn't be able to make any more pictures... aaaaaargh!!!!
The whole competition was quite long indeed, but we were already busy talking about the trains to take to come back home - so we spent some time looking at our timetable trying to figure out how were we going to get back home (not such a little problem!!)
I also made a couple of quick pauses and went outside the main rink to buy a little pin as a souvenir ( I have it on my skating bag, with those from the other competitions that I attended! ), and to make a couple of phone calls - to my mum, that wanted to know how everything was going, and to my skating teacher, who wanted to know how Vanessa Giunchi was doing.
Silvia was in pretty bad physical conditions (I learnt only later that she had a quite high temperature at the moment) and made some mistakes, at the end of the day she was 11th; Vanessa skated very well and finished 10th; among the girls on the podium, Slutskaya was the only one not to fall, with Butyrskaya falling twice and Volchkova three times... Gusmeroli failed almost every jump, finishing 14th in the free an 9th overall... This definitely was not one of the best competitions I saw!

After the end of the competition I came back to the skater's hotel with one of my friends, to look again for the my camera; unfortunately her roommate wasn't feeling very well and had gone to sleep, so I had to postpone the search and we spent some time chatting, before going back down in the hall to wait for the skaters to come down all dressed up for the official banquet.
I really regretted not having my camera with me, because the sight was amazing... Most of them had really dressed up for a black-tie event, and the ladies in particular were sporting all kinds of styles... The only thing that I really didn't like were all those Russians who had chosen to wear sandals with bare feet... aaargh, I was freezing just looking at them!
My friend was not there, so I cold not have pics of anyone... the only one skater I got to stop was Marina Anissina - she kindly stopped on her way to the banquet to pose with me. We spent a very good hour watching everyone pass by, then I went to have something to eat with some of the girls, with the idea of coming back in time for the skaters' return to the hotel.

At around 10 pm we were back in the hall of the Hotel Danube to see if we could get a second look at the skaters... This time I was lucky enough to see Gwendal coming in, and I managed to stop him and give him the present I had brought ( the collection of drawings that can be seen here)

Click to see Maren Hertzberg's full-size pic	The same pic from another angle (by my friend Mary)

( Maren didn't know that I was the one standing next to Gwendal at the time, but you can see a little bit of me beside him! Thanks a lot, Maren, for sending me this one: now I can see every day the lovely expression that Gwendal had on his face while watching my drawings :) :) ... ) Okay, I have to admit that this guy really deserves some more picture space here:

Me and Gwendal	me with him looking at my drawings	Mary and Gwendal
	Does this pic need any comment??

Other athletes I stopped, for a photo or an autograph, were Alexander Abt (veeeery nice!), the Lithuanians Drobiazko and Vanagas, Sergei Sakhnovski of Israel (who came back down to walk his lovely little dog), Petrova and Tikhonov from the Pairs competition (he makes the funniest faces I've seen!).

Paola & Sasha Abt	Paola & Mary with Lobacheva & Averbukh	Goncharov, Grushina, Averbukh, Chait, Sakhnovski and Lobacheva

Almost everyone else passed by, including our champions...
We had a couple of words with Barbara while she was waiting for the elevator, and she told us a little about the banquet... She was quite in a hurry because she really wanted to change her shoes, as one of the heels was broken and she definitely couldn't walk; she even had to be carried in someone's arms out of the banquet, but she didn't wanted to make such an entrance in the hotel, so she had cautiously walked (on her toes) till the elevators, but now she really wanted to take off the broken shoe!

This night we managed to go to bed earlier (it had been almost morning the night before, with all the discussions, watching the tape of the press conference & the celebrations in the hall, chatting...), with a taxi that left us a little insecure... the first thing he did was LOOKING FOR HIS MAP! Anyway, we managed to get to our hotel and have a little more hours of sleep, before going back to the ice to see the Gala.

Go to the next page:
Sunday Afternoon's Gala Exhibition

(Arriving, Dance Final, Celebrating, Saturday, The gala , Sunday night, Autographs)