Italian National Championships - "The skaters' thoughts"

Giada Russo - "Before Nationals I hadn't thought at all about winning. I came here thinking of staying calm, having fun and do my best. The first competitions I attended this season didn't go very well, but my results started to get better since Merano Cup. Now my team and I will decide in which competitions I will skate, besides the European Championships in Stockholm of course. Moreover, I am working on the triple Flip and a triple Toeloop-triple Toeloop combination and we will evaluate whether to attempt them or not in the next competitions"

Roberta Rodeghiero - "A second place is not the outcome I expected, given my competition results so far I was the favourite for winning. Unfortunately that's the way it goes, probably I felt a lot of pressure and I put too many expectations on me. I couldn't bear the pressure, that's all. I didn't have any problem in practice, a part from a moment where my condition decreased a bit because I was at my top shape since the beginning of this season. It wasn't a matter of training, but a matter of mindset. Of course I want to redeem myself at the European Championships, my goal is to make the top-ten, last year I placed eleventh – and I got very close on placing tenth – therefore that is my goal and I am going to work in order to achieve it. After Stockholm I will compete at the University Games, perhaps I will do a competition before Worlds, but we still have to think about it"

 

Ivan Righini - "Three days before Nationals I changed both boots and blades, because my old ones were in really bad shape, despite being new. The blades were not straight but quite curvy so I had to change them. Therefore I didn't come to this competition in my best condition, of course I had to skate and to show myself that I could face a competition despite my not ideal condition. Here I did a lot of mistakes but now I know what I have to work on. I am training in Oberstdorf now and it's quite hard for me, I moved from a big city to a small village in the mountains and I need time to adjust. It's difficult for me to hear German all the time, when I hear someone speaking Russian I feel at home and I can relax my mind for a while. Moreover, after 7 pm there's no one in the streets, and I need some action, because otherwise I have nothing that distracts me and I start thinking too much of skating and training, I need to focus on skating when I am skating and focus on relaxing when I am done with practices. In Germany we changed my jump technique a little bit, everything became a little bit better after that. Perhaps it was more difficult with the Axel, but the quad was already way better, before I couldn't land them anymore with Oleg Vassiliev. I am definitely going to put the quad in the Free Skating at the European Championships, I don't know whether one or two of them, we will decide in January. In the Short Program I will put the quad if it will be consistent enough in training, and of course I am going to do the Axel in both programs. After Stockholm I will attend the University Winter Games in Spain and maybe a competition at the end of February in order to gain more ranking points"

Matteo Rizzo - "These have been my first Senior National Championships, therefore it has been a new emotion for me. Skating here at Palavela, being in this arena, with a great audience...I felt at home. I am sorry for my mistake in the spin during the Short Program, but overall I am satisfied with how I skated that performance. Today I am happy I was able to skate a clean program and I achieved the highest Technical Score of the Men category, it has been a surprise for me. I also obtained a Personal Best, I am so happy. My next competition is going to be the European Youth Olympic Festival at the end of January, then the Junior World Championships. Later on my team and I will decide which further competitions I will attend. About the first part of the season, I didn't start very well at Lombardia Trophy – usually I consider my first competition of the year more of a practice – but after the Junior Grand Prix I found a stability that helped me to grow more and more until the performances I did in these two days in Turin"

Nicole Della Monica/Matteo Guarise - "The competition didn't obviously go as we expected, but sometimes even hitting your head against the wall is a good thing. This year we had improved always more as long as we had more competitions under our belt, therefore perhaps we were a bit nervous because of that, we expected this competition to be even better than the previous one. Thus our expectations were quite high, because we are in shape and we are able, even in training, to skate good programs. Perhaps we entered the rink a bit too confident with what we had to do; we are sure this experience will help us to approach the European Championships at our best. We will skate quite late in the skating order there, so we want to play our cards and definitely attack"

Luca Lanotte - "Our Programs were very good, we tried to reproduce exactly what we do in practice, even though the competition pressure makes your legs a bit shaky and the feeling on the ice is always different compared to a normal training. I think we are heading into the right direction, we only need to continue training the programs under an athletic point of view, that's the direction we want to follow for the European Championships. Also because of the style that our direct opponents in Stockholm represent – a program extremely ethereal and delicate – while we will represent a more physical style, athletic, fast and energetic. In the Free Dance we have mainly worked on Anna's character, as in China we received critics, of course useful and productive, about Anna's character being too delicate for the music we were interpreting, that there was no connection between the two of us. We tried to change the choreography and the story that lies behind it, using in it all the energy can Anna is able to give. I think that that's what we have portrayed today in our program. Regarding the Short Dance, the rhythms we have decided to interpret are neither Flamenco nor Paso Doble, but Fandango, and in this case Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol. We tried to choose a unique piece, to do something different because we expected the top pairs to create programs on the classical rhythms of Flamenco or Paso Doble, and they are in any case great programs. We think that this season it was more difficult to find an original music that could stand out for the Paso Doble, with the rhythm of last year it was way easier to find a music different from the standard Quickstep. That's why we tried to create something more original and less folkloristic, we know that in this case unfortunately there are going to be critiques as well, it's not a problem, but the important thing is that you have to know what you are talking about. This is a Spanish rhythm, and if someone expects to see the typical moves of a standard Paso Doble, it is obvious you cannot find them in our program. The European Championships are going to be our first competition, and the goal we have is the same we had here, which is to make the best performance we can in that competition. What ever will be, will be, we are not too much worried about placements, it would be pointless, any competition is different and it has different hierarchies, scores and levels"

Charlène Guignard/Marco Fabbri - "We are very happy because both Short and Free Dance were very good. Our goal was to skate like we did in Zagreb: two well executed programs, both under the technical and Components point of view. We are very satisfied because we had done very well here. About the European Championships we obviously want to improve our result compared from last year, we want to be always closer to the podium. We can definitely improve. We don't need to change anything concerning the elements' levels, but the execution of every element needs to be improved, in order to get higher GOEs, and some transitions in both programs need to be changed, in order to make them smoother. In the past days, in fact, we focused more on these aspects and we will take advantage of the weeks before Stockholm to work on them even more"