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Why was the Budapest Cup 2020 cancelled?


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Ice Fantasy from Finland. (Credits: Sebastien Muller - 2019)

The Organizing Committee announced today on social networks the cancellation of the 2020 edition of the Budapest Cup in Hungary. We asked the local organizers why they had to take this decision.

Why did you decide to cancel the Budapest Cup 2020? 


Szabolcs Baksay, Organizing Committee: Because of financial reasons. We have a deficit from the 2019 competition, plus we don't get any financial support for the 2020 competition. So we can't afford to organize the competition.  This year's deficit comes from one of our invoices which is not paid, and we don't know when it will be paid. The other major problem is that we just faced this month that we will not get any financial support for the 2020 competition. 

Was it a hard decision to take? 

It was extremely hard. We wanted to solve the problems in the final minutes, but in the end, we must admit that we can't solve them in such a short time. We love to organize this competition. We love that we have a lot of teams from all over the world and we are one of the largest synchro competitions in the ISU calendar. We invested a lot in the competition each year since the beginning.

How many teams were already registered for this 2020 edition? 

We haven't published the announcement yet, because we had problems with the financing of the competition. We expected 70-80 teams (in 2018 we had 83 teams) for 2020.





Is the new Challenger Series also one of the reasons?

We don't know how the Challenger Series would effect to our competition. We had a fear that it would a negative effect on our competition, but it is also true that the Budapest Cup is one of the most popular synchro competitions in the World.


The ISU didn’t show on their website that the competition was also opened to Non-ISU teams. Do you think that might have penalized you? 

It was misinformation on their website. We don't know why it was there, but we haven't asked them to fix it yet, because we have been busy to solve the financing problem. 
What do you think will be the future of the Budapest Cup?

We would like to continue the organizing of the Budapest Cup. We must solve the financial problems first and then we can continue the development of the competition. We have a huge experience in organizing work and we always have a lot of ideas. It is sure that we would like to develop our competition further. We always wanted to be a prestigious competition and I think that we are: a lot of top teams come to the Budapest Cup regularly and we attract thousands of visitors each year.

Are you interested in applying to become a Challenger Series stage in 2021?

Yes, we are very interested, but we don't know that it will be possible for us or not. As we know it doesn't depend on our intention, because the ISU Technical Committee will decide it.  

Something else to say to the fans?

We are very sorry that we are not able to organize the 2020 competition. Thank you very much to the Teams, Coaches, Partners, Sponsors, Synchro Experts and especially the Fans for the 5 beautiful years! We have an enormous amount of beautiful moments in our hearts. We continue the work and hope that we will have the chance to organize the competition in 2021. Please don't forget us!