Cappellini and Lanotte: "Ice Dancing would not be a sport without the Compulsories"

Over the last three years Anna Cappellini (21) and Luca Lanotte (23) from Italy have proved to be one of the most promising young ice dancing teams. Their results speak for themselves – the couple finished 8th at their first senior European championships in 2007, won silver at Skate Canada several months later and made the top ten at the last Worlds in Gothenburg, Sweden. Cappellini/Lanotte managed to capture the hearts of numerous fans across the world with their incredible musicality, passion and expressiveness of their skating. AS had a chance to catch up with Anna and Luca after their 4th place finish at Cup of Russia which took place in Moscow in the end of November.

Could you please sum up your Cup of Russia experience this year?

Anna: We definitely could have made a better competition. We didn't skate badly. Surely we lost a couple of points here and there and that overall cost us the place because we finished only 1,5 points behind Meryl Davis and Charlie White who were clearly behind us in the Original Dance because they had such a bad performance, but we could have used it if we hadn't had so many mistakes. Obviously it's a bit of a disappointment, but overall we skated like in China where we had such a good time. If you look at it compared to the other teams, it was definitely worst here, but if you consider what we did it's pretty much the same.

Luca: We could have done better in the Free. We were a little bit nervous when we took the ice. The result seems correct to me.

Coming into the FD, did you feel any pressure? With almost 7 point margin you had a very good chance to medal here.

Anna: We didn't feel that much of the pressure because we thought if we had skated a clean Free, we would have probably kept the place. We just wanted to go and perform well like we had already done in China. The difference was that this time we could not afford mistakes. In China, if we had done one or two mistakes we wouldn't have lost the place, here it happened. We didn't expect Meryl and Charlie to pull up like that. They are really great, obviously better than us at the moment; we just didn't expect they could get so many points. True is that there is a lot to work on. Maybe this is a good result. It's going to make us think a lot. Probably if we had kept the third place we would have thought too much of ourselves and we wouldn't work like we definitely are going now. We were so close to the medal and it really hurts to lose it just because of a couple of mistakes. We think we need to feel stronger on the ice and put up a bigger fight. It feels like whenever we take the ice we want to do our job and get out of there. That will come with the experience, but we need to work on that.

Full interview.