IWGA Athletes of the Month: Gabriele Goffredo and Anna Matus (MDA)
Congratulations to Gabriele Goffredo and Anna Matus, IWGA Athletes of the Month for March 2016. The Latin couple from Moldova won their first World Championship in Vienna, AUT, in November 2015. Since then they have remained undefeated, winning December’s GrandSlam Final in Shanghai, CHN, and the first leg of the 2016 GrandSlam Series in Helsinki, FIN, in early March.
The GrandSlam Helsinki was one of DanceSport’s numerous qualification events for The World Games 2017 in Wroclaw/Poland (20 - 30 July 2017). Gabriele Goffredo and Anna Matus are the reigning champions, after they won the Latin event at TWG 2013 in Cali/Colombia in front of a crowd of 17,000 at the bullfighting arena.
Gabriele Goffredo and Anna Matus teamed up five years ago and immediately started to generate headlines. They were finalists in every (!) competition from day one and made it onto the podium more often than not. At the same time, they stirred a great deal of controversy with a very personal and exuberant style of interpreting the five Latin dances. Love them or hate them; that summed up the range of reactions they triggered in experts and public alike. They just didn’t leave anyone indifferent! Maybe that’s why “top or flop” applied to their ranking during their first years together. But only if “flop” would be the appropriate way to describe a fourth-, fifth- or sixth-place finish.
Find out more about DanceSport on The World Games Channel.
