"In my opinion, the championship had several severe flaws that mixed up the results and caused me to believe that not the best one won (I think that the Italian guy was the fastest among us - judging from practising behind the curtain). First, as any speed cubist knows, the cube is manufactured in two different colorings: white - yellow, red - orange, and green - blue, and the other coloring is: white - blue, red - orange, and green - yellow. Speed cubing requires a lot fast decisions for which one naturally uses colors. Being used to one coloring and given a cube with the other coloring makes the times longer. I was fortunate that the coloring of the cubes did match the one I was used to. But it probably did not match for others. Second, the cubes were really hard to turn and were not prepared for serious speed cubing. The organisors should have prepared well greased cubes and not a bunch of tools for excersizing finger musles! You can say: well, everybody was given the same (bad) cube - so what's the big deal? The big deal is that some guys used systems which use smaller number of moves, yet one needs to spend little more time thinking, while others used systems with very little delays between stages, but with a slightly larger number of moves. All in all, the best guys from both camps would be approximately equally fast. A hard-to-turn cube gave advantage to the first group. A lot better solution would be to let the competitors use their own cubes. It would not be that hard to label the cubes ..." - Jessica Fridrich
