November 24, 2008

About That Milan Grand Prix...

By now, as our reader sandraizbasa (...) wrote in to tell us (thanks, Sandra! We'll reward you with a completely gratuitous photo below!), the Italian Gymnastics Federation has posted the results of the Milan Grand Prix. You can find them here.

Have a good look at those results. If they're anything to go by, only six finals were contested in Milan - three for the men, three for the women. With one notable exception, there were only five competitors in each final. Only six countries were represented, and only Italy and Romania sent more than one competitor. About half of the competitors hailed from the host nation, Italy. And you call that a Grand Prix event, Milan?

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Sandra Izbasa, probably wishing she'd gone to Marseille instead (photo: ProSport)

We'll admit it: We were excited about this competition when we heard He Kexin and Sandra Izbasa would be in it. And hey, He apparently did a good job of it (a 17.000 is nothing to be sniffed at, even if it was a bit inflated). But boy, are we glad we didn't buy tickets for that competition. Even if it did boast seven Beijing medalists strutting their stuff.

Here's hoping that as a test event for next year's Europeans, the Milan Grand Prix was successful. The Europeans should draw a deeper field...

7 comments:

  1. The Italian Grand Prix is not like in other countries. is a kind of performance and is always the same as in 2007 and 2006.Sandra partecipated in 2006 so she certainly knew that the Grand Prix was not a great competition.But you should know that many Romanian gymnasts are part of Italian clubs and then have relations of friendship in fact the Romanian team, composed of Izbasa, Druncea (who competed at the Grand Prix), Patrscu, Dragoi and Porgras, went to find the company Gal Lissone....

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  2. Oh, so it's always like that? We didn't know that. Interesting format. Not entirely our cup of tea though.

    We were aware that Romanian gymnasts occasionally compete for Italian clubs (just like others compete for German clubs) and also that the Italians and Romanians often have joint tramping camps. They certainly appear close, so we're not all that surprised to hear that the team paid a visit to GAL Lissone. We hope they paid attention to the tricks the girls are learning there. We actually think Italian gymnastics (especially as performed by the G.A.L. Lissone girls) is more interesting than Romanian gymnastics right now!

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  3. Yes,in 2007 partecipated only Li Shanshan,Steliana Nistor and Irina Krasnianska.The other gymnasts were all italian..
    OK ;)
    The aricle about the visit by the romanian gymnasts is here (the first article)-----> http://www.gal-lissone.it/index1.htm
    but is in all in italian of course.

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  4. Aha! Well, Li, Nistor, and Krasnianska are always worth watching. I (Mihaela) personally love Irina Krasnianska and would travel a fair distance to see her. Kudos to Milan for getting her! I guess we won't be so harsh about this competition in the future.

    We couldn't find the document about the Romanian gymnasts - the URL you posted doesn't take you there and there seem to be no relevant references on the page it does take you to. If you think it's a relevant article, could you please send it to me at mightymihaela@gmail.com? Thank you very much in advance!

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  6. The article is not important...It says a few things that i wrote here ;)

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