This weekend was the Kyykkä Academic World Championship competition in Tampere, Finland. As usual, I took part in the event, as I've done since at least '98, every year. This was my second year in the WiO -team, and I have a few pics and short videoclips that I'll try to make available sometime soon.
The event has grown over the years significantly, this year there were 512 teams in the General Cup, the first rounds were 4 team minicups, the best 128 teams (winners of their slots) made it forward to the elimintation rounds (1-on-1 winner advances).
The first match was mostly getting used to the Tampere equipment (I recommend taking our own karttus next year, hopefully I remember that when the time comes).
During the heat we had an hour of slack time between our first two games, so we set up our field-kitchen - a Trangia-stove, some Glögi (kind of a mulled wine), juice and our favourite beverage, ethanol. We took advantage of the time, and checked out at our coming opponents, while enjoying sufficient quantities of warm and warming drinks.
We won our heat pretty much hands behind our backs, not a perfect game by any measure, but a clear winner in every game with a reasonably reassuring score.
An hour later it was time for the first elimination match and our luck had us against the reigning champions from Lappeenranta. Last year we were dropped in the first heat by one of last years finalists, and that memory was pretty clear at least in my mind. It was time to focus and give our opponents a cause for doubt.
The field for our elimination match was very uneven, on a slope, and the upper part of the slope was nearly a half-pipe. We started the first round playing uphill, and did a fairly decent game, considering the circumstances, but the champs beat us pretty good, by at least 10 points.
The second round we had the better end of the field, and were able to hand the champs their first lost round this year, but our victory was not sufficient, and we lost the match with a few points. Well, more specifically, they played too well uphill compared to us. Our downhill score were pretty much even.
The rest of the day was then getting entertained in Tampere, in a number of places, such as Plevna and Sputnik. And since we had not avoided "doping" during the games (that started at 9am), we were in a pretty happy state later that night :-)
On Sunday we headed to the Vakoilumuseo (Spy museum), had a quick lunch and headed back home, already planning the tactics for next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment