Santa Claus Cup, 2008

So it has arrived, Peter's first real shorttrack race. Santa Claus Cup 2008, Budapest.

And in fact a very proud dad reporting, you may expect a very much biased report here :)
It was a 2-day race, with a warm-up session in the evening prior to the first day, so we had to drive to Budapest early afternoon on Friday, 12th December. Peter enjoyed the evening session quite a bit, he especially liked the quality of ice in the rink.
Saturday morning the race started with the smallest ones, so he had to get on ice quite early, in Heat 3 of 500m. He finished 2nd in his heat so he made it directly into the final, though I was not too much satisfied with his time, he clearly eased up in the last 2 laps, giving away 2 seconds per lap. It is quite uncommon from him but I told myself it must have been the stage fright.
In the finals he finished 6th but no problem, as he was smallest & youngest so grabbing a 6th place from 14 competitors is a very nice achievement.

Then came the heats of 222m and he made it to the semis in a nice way, it was a big fight to claim 2nd but he missed it by 0.2 seconds. In the semis he finished 3rd so went to the B-final and finished 3rd there (7th from 14).
After all these heats and finals he had to do the 333m quarter-final in the evening but again, showing a superb form, got it under his belt coming 2nd.

The next day he was simply - tired. He was lacking concentration and was yawning while I laced up his boots - not the best state of mind to get on ice at all :s But I think I must not blame him for that, he had to fight in 6 stages the previous day and this kind of pressure was quite unknown for him so far - but remember, he is only 7 years old...
He fell in the 333m semi-final so went into the final B, where he met the mats again so finished 3rd there (7th from 14 again).
Then there was only 1 commitment left for him, to cover the starting 1.5 laps in the relays for cat C-D-E boys, so we could start a relay team, otherwise there would have been only 2 boys from the team, missing the criteria of 3 starting... He started (looked bit comic compared to 14-yr-old boys...) and made a nice relay, so he did what he had to do for the team :)
Overall he gained 7th place and everyone finishing ahead of him was significantly older - just click and check out the age of the others on the overall classification list. He ran super times, personal bests in all distances and very promising ones - now I am very very curious about his season-ending times due in March or so.
Generally speaking about the race itself it was very well organized, with a good speaker and nice people all around.

Complete results are here, or you can see them filtered for Cat F boys, too.
I'll try my best uploading videos to YouTube and link them here ASAP.