WSSA in Paris - A review from Tiziano Ferrari
Hi all, just finished the PSWC, one of the most important and best events of the year! Great results for Powerslide as well :) The competition started with Style slalom classic, the men were in 43 partecipants and a strange weather: it was sunny and there was some rain at the same time. Anyway the results: 28th: Robin 22th: Davide 16th: Guillermo 10th: Luca 2nd: Tizy (Europe champion) the women were in 22: 5th: Barbara In slide competition only Guillermo competed (everybody was too much destroyed except him :D) and he did a 16th place on 25 competitors On Saturday we did Speed slalom ( YEAH ) Everybody stretched into shorts and bodies, got up skates and Matter wheels and did their times! The strange was the start on the ramps: nobody is training with them so we saw a lot of good skaters going out in qualification runs.. Anyway Barbara took the 1st place in qualific. against every woman, and Tizy did the same for the men, after him Davide 4th, Yohan 6th, Robin 13th and Luca 15th. Barbara won and won to arrive at the final, against a girl from the team France, who beated her at the end. So a good 2nd place for Barbara who is European vice-champion of speed slalom but took a lot of points in the ranking to reach the 1st position in world ranking. For the men, just 16 skaters qualified, Luca was beated from a fast italian guy, and Robin was beated from Davide, who passed to the 4th of final. Tizy and Yoahn passed too to the quarters. Davide found his quarter final rival very fast, and went out even if he started very well, in fact Tizy meet that guy in semi's and he was so impressive! But at least Tizy won, like Yohan won against the other fast italian skater...so the first and the second place contented from 2 PS riders. The first run was won by Yohan, 2 fast and clean runs but him was faster than Tizy, and the second one Tizy was faster but with one cone penalty more, kicked during the push. Yohan won his European speed slalom title and Tizy vice-champion: what a good podium! On Sunday we competed on battle style, maybe the most difficult discipline for freestyle skaters, but also maybe the funniest one! The girls started and demonstrated they can compete as well as a man, or maybe better why not? They're more technic on sitting tricks, they're more flexible..they're careful about their runs, not like the men who start their runs into the cones like wild animals. There were Barbara and Miriam for PS who passed easy and smooth to the next round, but at the 8th of final they were in the same group and just Barbara passed to quarters, anyway good job of Miriam! The weather were bad in one minute, but the organization was fantastic, like always! They mounted a super big tent to accomodate the event, so it was raining all over the big tent but the ground was like a blader X track: wet, slippery, and a lot of pals for the tent, between the cones! More than one skater had an hurt over them :) Tizy too, but we don't have the pic, luckily. Barbara did a well quarter to find an hard semifinal against russian girls, who are like "iceminds" and think just about hard tricks. After an evil round with an ukrainian and a russian skater Barbara took the 3rd against an other italian girl and passed in consolation final for the 5th to8th. At the end it was the most difficult round for her, and even if she terminated 8th place, she competed well. We were a lot there to compete, so first, for the men, we did a qualification run to pass to qualification grups (just for the skaters with a very low ranking position) where we saw Robin passing easy to the next round. At the 8th of finals it was more complicated because we find russian and korean skaters, very high technical tricks to beat! Luca didn't pass because it was so difficult, the same for Adrian, and Davide was very very unlucky to be sick in that competition day so he didn't pass too :( Anyway Tizy and Robin found an occasion to be in quarters (difficult to be in quarter with those top skaters) and from quarters they did a good job to pass also in semi finals! But there they had a big trick/war against koreans and german slalom players, arriving 3rd or 4th is not to bad in a 4 persons group, hope we can do better next time! So the last group for Tizy and Robin was the consolation final, it was won by Rudy from Germany, 2nd Tizy, 3rd Robin, 4th Andrey Shitov from Russia. Tizy took the bronze medal as the 3rd European skater, because in the Final were 3 koreans and Martin from Germany, who was 2nd after KSJ. After this round we did the price giving, a lot of prices, pics, stupid pics, greetings, and a lot of rain to complete everything :) Next time will be: Rollercup, Monza, for the italian cup! Ciao and see you Tizi
09.06.2010	Freeskate