The Standard competition will kick off this weekend’s upcoming event in Rimini, Italy, and the Latin session will highlight its end. 

Currently, we await about 150 couples to take part in the Latin segment of the third GrandSlam leg of 2019. This is the second year that a WDSF GrandSlam is being hosted in the city of golden sands by the Adriatic Sea, an event that has seen an almost three-time increase in Latin participants in just one year! Last year, only 67 couples took part, and now there are 150.

Along with the countries of Russia and Germany, Italy is renowned in the strength of its DanceSport athletes—a statement that corresponds with the strength of the GrandSlams taking place in each of these three locales. The Russian Open Championships, German Open Championships, and Italian Dance Championships mark the strongest three GrandSlams out of the five to be hosted this year.

Preparation Before the World Championship

Rimini marks one of the two GrandSlams left just before the prestigious WDSF World Latin Championship to be held in September, just two months away, so each competition is immensely important for every duo, especially those preparing to attain new results and new rankings in one of the most important battles of the year. 

The reigning world champions Armen Tsaturyan and Svetlana Gudyno will be in the running to attain their second world title this year. We will be watching them here in Rimini, where they are favored to win the gold to for a second time around. 

Right behind them vying for the top of the pedestal is Marius-Andrei Balan and Khrystyna Moshenska of Germany. The battle here in Rimini will serve as a preview of worlds in September, a trial run of sorts for what we should expect in Moscow very soon. 

Tsaturyan and Gudyno have not attended the GrandSlam of the German Open Championships since 2016, so will most likely be their last GrandSlam performance before worlds, their last meeting with Germany’s strongest competitive pair. Balan and Moshenska have just gotten back from their World Open win at the danceComp of Wuppertal, Germany, so they are well warmed up to give an outstanding performance Sunday in Rimini.

Expected Battles in the Semifinal

It seems that we will not be seeing Hungarian couple Andrea Silvestri and Martina Varadi taking the dance floor this weekend, which will lead to Polish pair Edgar Marcos Borjas and Alina Nowak most likely making the top six. 

It will also be quite a fantastic and important event for Romanian pair Paul Moldovan and Cristina Tatar, a couple who made a strong breakthrough in their GrandSlam performance in Taipei last month. They reached the top of the semifinal round, placing seventh, just one place away from making the final! This was the highest GrandSlam ranking of their competitive careers, a true rise from their performance in the Bucharest GrandSlam in March where they placed last in the semifinal in 12th position. Who knows, they may even possibly make the final here in Italy! 

Nonetheless, it will be a challenge as we have hungry competitors vying for each spot from each and every corner. Jakub Lipowski and Diandra-Aniela Illes of Poland and Konstantin Gorodilov and Dominika Bergmannova of Estonia will be right there with the same intentions to perform better than ever before. It will be a sight to see, as usual! And with the absence of stars Anton Aldaev and Natalia Polukhina of Russia and Guillem Pascual and Rosa Carne of Spain, we have Vito Coppola and Oona Oinas of Italy along with Winson Tam and Anastasia Novikova of Canada, two more rising duos in the running for their best rankings yet.

Stay tuned here on FloDance as we await a heated weekend to come our way. Not only will we see some amazing dancing, but we may just witness some unexpected turns in the final rankings of the competitors. Maybe another couple will make a long-awaited breakthrough! We shall soon see.