Spanish Rubik Championship 2004

Last saturday we celebrated the Spanish Rubik Championship 2004, quite a successful event both in terms of competitors and public, and a high level one. Ernesto Fernández is the new Spain Champion with an average time of 31.43 seconds on five cubes; José Manuel Peralta solved the fastest cube (and now Spanish Official Record) on 25.04 seconds at the semifinals. Second place was for Luis Rey with 33.57 and Third for Manuel Madrid with 36.22.

I was eight with a best cube of 50.86 seconds, averaging 64.76 between the first and second rounds.

In the picture, the nineteen competitors and the people from Popular de Juguetes, who organized the event.

In exhibition time, Stefan was invited to astound everybody: he solved a cube blindfolded in about 14 minutes (that includes 7-8 minutes for learning, another 6-7 for solving blinfolded), then five cubes in a row in just 2 minutes, 10 seconds, and a one-handed solve in just 50 seconds.

Almost all of the participants were men. There were only two women and one of them (Isabel) was only twelve years old -- and she ended 15th with 1 minute 40 seconds. There were two clear groups in the event: the thirtysomething 'old ones' pack, people like me, who lived the cube fever in the '80s... and the 'new wave' of twentysomething youngsters. One of the competitors (José Manuel, if I remember correctly) told us he has solved around 300.000 cubes in his life.

I uploaded my pictures collection to FlickR with the tag campeonato españa rubik 2004 (rubik itself works fine, as there seem not to bee too many Rubik pictures there). If you have pictures of the event you can do the same.

There are also some videos that I uploaded to the archive page of the Spanish Rubik Club in Yahoo Groups. (There were like 10 or 15 cameras in the event), and a mirror can be found here:

Quicktime MPEG4 videos (between 1 and 4 MB)
rubik-2004-ernesto.mp4 (1st)
rubik-2004-luis.mp4 (2nd)
rubik-2004-manuel.mp4 (3rd)
rubik-2004-jose-manuel.mp4 (Spain Record)
rubik-2004-previo.mp4 (practising)
rubik-2004-stephan-5-cubos.mp4 (five cubes)
rubik-2004-stephan-demo.mp4 (demo)
rubik-2004-stephan-una-mano.mp4 (one-handed)

Update: Stefan just published his coverage and pictures of the event: Spanish Rubik Championship 2004.

There is a also a Spanish version of this post available

También existe una versión en castellano de esta anotación