Zagreb Trophy 2010

As mentioned earlier, after 1 week on ice we've already been to a competition that was scheduled quite early in the race calendar, at the first weekend of October. The Zagreb Trophy was the first station of the Alpe-Adria Cup, which was planned to have 4 stages but now it seems there will be only 3. The original plans included Zagreb, Delnice, Sarajevo and Celje, but if you look at the calendar these days, the Sarajevo leg in February is missing :( Too bad, I really would have enjoyed a trip there and look around in the Olympic stadium.

Anyway, Zagreb. Luckily it is not a long drive from home so with an early-afternoon start we've arrived to the hostel at a reasonable time. Next day we got up at 6am and had breakfast, then went to the rink at 7am for the training. The rink, placed next to a hippodrome is called Klizaliste Velesajam and looks quite impressive from the outside, and is very friendly inside, too. There are many large, warm dressing rooms, a nice coffee bar, huge panoramic windows, and everything was quite warm - though it may have helped that it was nice fall weather outside. One could comfortably get around the rink without a coat, contrary to some deep-freeze rinks :)

The racing field size was not big at all but it matched the team's aims perfectly: early-season 'training' competition, to get in the mood of racing. And who knows, if we race in all the competitions of the series, we might get a good overall result anyway. While mostly local racers, there were kids from Slovenia, Bosnia,  Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech and even from Kazakhstan. We've entered 3 competitors, TR (cat E), CD (cat C) and Peter (cat F).

Peter's field was only 3, with JP from Szeged and the local TK, who was obviously a real beginner, so it was down to a 2-men battle. Peter had beautiful starts in every heat but could'n skate in a good form in the first day at all. It was clearly visible he missed time on ice and could show some decent movement form only on the second day. That day he fought much much better but fell 2 times - no luck. His best time on 500m was only 1 second slower though than his PB from the last season. 2nd in each distance he grabbed a silver medal this time.

TR was the youngest of her category and she's been racing only for 1 year now, so it was obvious she would not win yet. Anyway she did not finish last and managed to better her PB on 2 distances.
CD only missed 3rd overall due to a big tactic error (not paying attention who is taking over) and a disputable penalty in the superfinal. He also managed to get a new PB on 500m.

After a lengthy ceremony we headed home but this time the travel seemed to take much much longer - still we managed to get home quite early. It was a good competition with a friendly attitude, quite some early-season-form errors and mistakes to analyze and correct. Let's hope the upcoming legs will be as useful as this one was at least.
No videos this time (you know, will publish only those that are worth it...), results are here. You can find quite some photos around on FB.