SA dance champs ready for Games
15 July 2005
South Africa's top-ranked Latin American and ballroom dancing champions will be in action at the 2005 World Games, a unique international event featuring non-Olympic sports.
The 2005 World Games, the seventh since the inception of the Games in 1981, is being held in the four German cities of Duisburg, Bottrop, Oberhausen and Mülheim from 14 to 24 July.
National Latin American coach Cathy Gibbons says the competitors are quietly determined to make a mark against the world's top pairs - and that they could pull off a couple of surprises.
"The fact that there is only one couple per country leaves the field wide open for dark horses to do well with one spectacular performance on the day," says Gibbons.
The young Latin American pair of Mark-Bruce
Sasnovski and Lizl Jooste is relatively inexperienced internationally, but Gibbons says they have the pedigree to do well.
As do Regardt van der Merwe and Lana Isaacs, a pair of Cape Town students who are the reigning South African ballroom champions in a country where Dancesport has really taken off in popularity over the past few years.
"If either of our pairs reach the finals - which is the top six - they will have done extremely well," says Gibbons, who points to South Africa's proud record of producing top dancers. The current world professional champion, Brian Watson, is a South African who now dances under the German flag.
At the World Games, 68 couples - the international elite in a sport with unrivalled gender parity - take to the parquet floor to put dancing's unique blend of proper technique and elegance on display.
What needs to come across as an effortless succession of different steps performed to music - in Latin, Standard as well as Rock 'n
Roll - is in fact one of the hardest aerobic workouts.
Standard dances comprise five different styles: the Waltz, Tango, Viennese Waltz, Slow Foxtrot and Quickstep. The Latin American section sees five different dances as well: the Samba, Cha Cha Cha, Rumba, Paso Doble and Jive.
While the athletes do not know which melodies they will dance to, the basic rhythm and tempo for the music are governed by the competition rules of the International Dance Sport Federation.
Through elimination rounds, couples taking part in a competition are reduced to the last six. In the finals of every dance, the judges place each couple from first to sixth, and the winners are the couple with the most "firsts" accumulated in the different dances.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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