We competed in the Inaugural Britannia Cup 2020 on 11 January, held at the Motorpoint Arena in Nottingham. The competition has previously run as the British Championships, but 2020 sees the competition open to teams from across the world, streamed live on BBC Sport.
The adult category was incredibly popular, with 15 teams competing from across England and Scotland.
This was the first competition of the season for us, and we had spent months tailoring the routine to the new season’s rules. As some of our regular followers will know, we had a bit of a ‘mare at the competition in 2019, so we arrived in Nottingham hoping to do justice to the training we’ve been doing for months, and to show what we could do. We’re happy to report, by the way, that we can all have a good laugh about what happened last year now!
We had a fantastic practice in the morning, and a long but chilled out day waiting for the competition. We were very lucky to be joined by hairdresser Jo who worked incredibly hard to do everyone’s 20s inspired hairdos.
Off-ice warm up and run-throughs done, we were ready. Skating 9th, we had a strong start with our intersection, and the transition that went so badly wrong last year went perfectly. The team were full of genuine smiles. Chris Buchanan, commenting for the BBC live stream, complimented us on our speed over the ice and our ‘attack’ of the choreography, both things that our coach Vicky Mayne has worked hard with us on.
We scored 22.44 and were thrilled to go into first place, but even more pleased that we felt that we had skated as we intended. With a further 6 teams to go, we just missed out on a medal in 4th place. The top scoring teams were:
Ice Diamonds (Nottingham) – 27.03
Bladerunners (Altrincham) – 25.50
Orion (Lee Valley) – 23.90
Northern Stars – 22.44
Given that we were the smallest team of the top 4 and therefore limited in the levels that we could achieve, we were really encouraged with our score. Next up, the Trophy D’Ecosse in February!