The courses were promoted by FIRS, the Italian Federation and the Artistic Skating Accedemy of Pescara with the coordination of Sara Locandro. After six years the seminar and stage are now a strong reference in the world artistic skating movement. Almost 300 athletes and more than 150 coaches arrived from Slovenia, USA, Australia, Israel, France, Colombia, Argentina, Spain and Brazil to participate in the activities. The topics interested and captivated the attention of the audience creating debates.

During the coaches' seminar Sara Locandro, Gabriele Quirini, Doctors Biagio Belmonte, Anna Nosella and Alfredo D'Ilario, Nicola Genchi, Raffaello Melossi, Paolo Colombo and Michele Terruzzi introduced the following topics:

“The psico-pedagogical approch for athletes who play sports in artistic skating", “The LUTZ single-double-triple according to the outside take-off edge", "Technical clarifications on different figure exercises to unify teaching and evaluation system”, “Relationship athlete-coach”, “Proposal for a future improvement in the judging system of Artistic Skating”, “Propedeutic exercises of "alignment" for the figure exercises through the preparation without and with skates”, “Considerations on the validity of a preparation that includes learning more specialties in artistic skating” and "Spins".



The lessons were translated in english and spanish and the organization provided all participants with the material in the three languages. The oral lessons were completed with the activities in the rink, where the coaches had the opportunity to compare with the coaches of the Italian team.

Also for the athletes the four days had been really intense: they were enthusiast and tireless during the long hours of training in the rink.

Sara Locandro told us to be very happy for the huge success of the initiative:

“It has been great, beyond expectation. Both in the seminar and in the stage the numbers were really hight, and everybody found the topics and the activities truly interesting. We tried to organize everything at our best: the split shifts were dovetailed perfectly, so that we were able to have few athletes followed by many coaches. And the final exhibition was amazing: more than 250 athletes in the rink and the exhibitions of great champions such as Andrea Aracu, Debora Sbei, the couple Decembrini-Venerucci. It has been a beautiful thing, and we received a lot of compliments. The international artistic skating movement is growing bigger and bigger”.

More pictures by Raniero Corbelletti in the GALLERY