Sportopolis

I wonder if there is any town that is has produced as many successful sportspeople per head of population as Csikszereda.

Novak Edouard

I have gone on before about the ice hockey team and how they are the best in Romania  - well, they've been champions for the last seven years, and while this streak may well be ended this year by Brasov, the vast majority of Romania's national team hail from Harghita County and more specifically this town.  And while Romania's hockey team is not close to being the best in the world, they do reasonably well, and in the past have done extremely well.  Someone I consider a friend was on the team at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, (the famous one in which the USA beat the USSR in what the US media referred to as "The Miracel on Ice"), at which they finished 7th.  Which is not to be sniffed at.

Tofalvi Eva

But, you may be thinking, ice hockey is a fairly niche sport in Romania and it's really only popular here, so that's not necessarily a big deal.  Obviously I'll have to come up with more sportspersons to convince you.  Well, how about Novak Edouard, Romania's only ever paralympic medalist and current World and Olympic champion in cycling?  (Who, in fact was a very fine young speed skater before the accident which cost him a leg and meant he ended up as a paralympian)

And then cast your eyes over to Sochi and the current Olympics going on there.  Featuring no fewer than 4 separate Szeredans.  Some of whom have done extraordinarily well, especially given the lack of funding and support that Romania offers to its athletes.  A quick listing of the results so far shows a genuinely superb set of performances:

Eva Tofalvi, biathlete
7.5km sprint - finished 22nd
10km pursuit - 26th
15km individual - 21st
12.5km mass start - 21st

Edit Miklos, alpine skier

Miklos Edit

super combined - 16th
downhill - 7th
super-g - 15th
giant slalom - 34th

Emoke Szocs, biathlete
7.5km sprint - 70th
15km individual - 70th

Zoltan Kelemen - figure skater
short programme - 24th
free programme - 23rd

Given the circumstances, these are truly brilliant results, and these people should be extremely proud of themselves.

[Note: Because the new Hungarian constitution allows anyone of Hungarian ethnicity to become a Hungarian citizen, two of the above athletes (Miklos and Szocs) have competed under the Hungarian flag rather than the Romanian. As I understand it they say it's because they felt they were offered more support by the Hungarian Olympic Committee, but (a) that wouldn't be difficult; and (b) personally I think that's a shame, and if people have to participate in the Olympics under a national banner I'd rather they would have done so under the Romanian one, but ultimately I'm counting them as "from Csikszereda" before anything else anyway.  And, if people actually paid any attention to the Olympic Charter this wouldn't be an issue anyway since it says

Article 6: The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries.

But sadly everyone ignores that and makes it all about nationalism anyway.  I mean why - given the above - do we have a medals table?]

So, anyway, before we end up down the usual cul-de-sac of my standard rants about national identity, can anyone give me a town with a greater number of top athletes per head of population?

Le Tour de Ciuc

I've always been a big fan of the Tour De France. Well, I say "always", but obviously that's an exaggeration, since for many years of Le Tour, I wasn't actually born, and even when I was it didn't feature on British TV until I was in my teens (a quick check of past winners would seem to suggest I first watched it in 1983, when Channel 4 started showing it). More recently two major factors have lessened my enjoyment somewhat - the knowledge that most of the riders are on drugs, and the overshadowing of the race by the vast and obnoxious ego that is Lance Armstrong. [On a venn diagram of those two factors there is a significant overlap, allegedly]. But I still kind of get into it, despite suspecting that any results could be changed at any time in the next 6 months as someone or other gets busted.

Anyway, this weekend I was able to witness first hand professional top drawer road-race cycling. Well, maybe not top drawer, because that would be Le Tour and other major races, and probably not second drawer because that would be other races that might occasionally get a mention on Eurosport or somewhere, and maybe not even the third drawer from the top, but at least the fourth drawer down. Which on most chests of drawers is the bottom one, I guess, so bottom drawer professional road race cycling.

This was because it was the "Tour of Szeklerland" (It exists! Really! Check out the mention of it on the website of the "Union Cycliste Internationale" if you don't believe me). Pretty much every stage started and finished here right outside our apartment so it was fairly easy to keep track. There were teams from all over (well all over Eastern Europe at least - Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech republic, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel and probably others I missed).

Professional cyclists are fast. I mean really quite ludicrously fast. Yesterday the final stage of the race involved 17 longish (5.5km each) circuits of the town, which meant they zipped by on a regular basis, while the official cars following them struggled to keep up. The first stage of the race involved a route which took them from here up to Gyergyo/Gheorgheni, across the Bucsin pass to Parajd/Praid, down to Udvarhely/Oderhei and back here. 193 kms, and a fair few serious hills including Bucsin which is 1300m high and is a right brute even in a car. If I were to set off to cycle that route, I'd take a week off work. They did it (in the pouring rain) in under 5 hours. (Report on that stage and the others - when they are posted today I presume - can be found here) And these are the fourth division journeyman pros of cycling world. Your Alberto Contadors must be just a blur when they pass.

Sadly the little guide which we got for the race which includes the stage profiles and routes and everything doesn't tell me how the hills they climbed relate to the categories that they use on Le Tour. Bucsin is listed as being category A - does that mean it would be a first category climb? I'd really like an idea of how close the hills here which I know very well are to the climbs that they do on the telly. Yesterday morning in "halfstage 3" they did a time-trial up to the Harghita ski-resort from down the bottom here. 14 kms of cycling with an ascent of slightly over 600m. The winner took 28 minutes. That's just insane. I'd struggle to get one-quarter of the way up in 28 minutes.

For the record the winner was a bloke called Vitaliy Popkov from Ukraine. Yesterday's final stage was won by a French guy (Aurelian Passeron) who rides for the local Tusnad Cycling Team who are based here. I presume that means he sort of lives here, which means that I'll have to add him to my mental list of "foreigners living in Csikszereda". He apparently has ridden in the actual Tour de France (last year it would seem, though I don't think he finished it).

It was a good event. I hope they do it again next year.