Euros Blog #1 by Tanja Kolbe & Stefano Caruso
IDC is pleased to have Germany’s Tanja Kolbe & Stefano Caruso blogging for us from the 2012 European Championships.
- Tanja & Stefano’s Blog Gallery (photos coming soon)
Day of arriving and First Day of practice
Hello everybody,
We are the ice dance couple Tanja Kolbe & Stefano Caruso and last time we were reporting from the international Ice Skating Competition in Finland. It was a pretty dramatic competition for us and we hope the reports from the European Championships will be exciting too — but hopefully not that dramatic. 🙂
We arrived yesterday, 21.01.2012, in Manchester and from there we were brought by a bus 2.5 hours to the Hotel Jurys Inn in Sheffield. The flight was already very exciting, because it’s extremely windy here and we came in a small plane from Milan. So when we wanted to land, the plane was basically thrown around in the air and it could hardly land. We were all a little bit afraid to not even reach our destination.
Later in the afternoon we arrived in the hotel which is pretty nice and modern and very near to the city center. The rooms are small but nice. The only thing to criticize is that there is no internet in the rooms for free but at least there is in the lobby. In the evening we all (our teammates Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri, our coach Barbara Fusar-Poli and the Italian Team leader Olga Gilardini) went to eat dinner in a nice Italian restaurant in the city. It was really tasty and nice, but I hope we will eat over the next days maybe something more English.
We slept well and had a wonderful breakfast. It was nice that we didn’t have to wake up early because the draw for the Preliminary Round was at 1 p.m. After that, we could watch the first and second group because we were in the third practice group. Stefano was fishing the number 12 in the draw, which is pretty good and means that we are in third group. The ice rink is really big and beautiful and the ice itself is fine. Our practice was going really well and we were not nervous for now. We will see how it´s going tomorrow, but hopefully it will go as well as today 🙂 We had two coaches supporting us because beside Barbara was also the German Team Leader, Martin Scotnicky, who arrived yesterday night. After we skated part of our free dance program, they both agreed we were in top condition on the ice.
There was also a little bit public watching and so it was fun skating for them, even if it was just practice. The atmosphere of this competition is wonderful and something special. Tonight would be another practice possible, but we will skip it and relax because tomorrow morning is another practice before the competition around 3 pm. Our group will start at 4:30 p.m. and we will be third to skate.
Now, after the practice we relaxed a bit and later we will all go to eat dinner together, maybe in a different restaurant.
So until tomorrow, have a great day everybody and thank you for reading our blog and supporting us!!!
Greetings Tanja & Stefano