Team Estreija and Team Magic finished at the top of the Mixed Age division in Salzburg. 

Team Estreija from Finland and Team Magic from Hungary finished first and second at the 2023 Amadé Cup last Sunday in the Mixed Age category. A look back at their weekend in Austria.

"On Sunday, we didn't celebrate our win almost at all because we flew back to Finland on Monday and had an early wake-up. But today (Thursday) on practise, we did get a celebration cake", said Team Estreija, winner of the Amadé Cup in the Mixed Age division.

Team Estreija is not a Mixed Age team but a Non-ISU Junior team in Finland. "We will compete in the 2. qualifications, which are on next week in Turku. We also have one smaller competition in Porvoo and a" final competition" in Espoo. We only had one international competition this season," the team from Lahti said. 

To compete in the Junior and Mixed Age divisions, the team had to make a few changes in the program. "We added SySp before the competition and one transition to make our program a bit longer. Otherwise, in Finland, we do compete with the same elements (minus the SySp)."

"Our strengths this season are solid team, reliability in competitions and interpretation. Our weaknesses are sometimes being on time, for example, at practices."

Team Estreija's head coach is Jenni Metzner-Vesaaja. Hanna Luostarinen and Annika Aaltonen are part of their coaching team. The team has 15 skaters this season and trains about 7 hours per week.

Winning a (silver) medal last weekend was more of a surprise for Team Magic Mixed Age from Hungary. "Honestly, we didn’t know exactly what our competitors were capable of or on what level they were. We were going into this competition completely blind:) We were really happy when we saw that we had placed second, which we celebrated by listening to our favourite music on the way back to our hotel," the team said.

At the beginning of the season, Team Magic had a lot of newcomers joining the team. Therefore they paid extra attention to the basics. "We believe that persistence and the love for our sport would be the best attributions to describe our strengths for this season. Eventually, due to the number of new skaters, we had a short time to prepare our programs."

In Hungary, synchro is starting to become more and more popular across the whole country. Therefore the rural associations have more and more skaters as well. "Over the last few years, all of the teams showed huge technical improvement of which we see the result now. We have more ice possibilities and more opportunities to train ourselves," explains Team Magic.

Barbara Zenezini and Michael Zenezini coach the Hungarian team. "They support and encourage us and have been by our side for six years." This year, this Mixed Age team has 20 skaters and trains approximately 15 hours per week.