posted Jul 5th, 2007 - The first competition day of the Malevsky Cup 2007 was far from being over after Round 5. The scores of rounds six and seven were still added yesterday. The event management even planned to use the beautiful Russian summer weather and complete Round 8. Commercial air traffic was in the way in the evening, and the first day was over after seven rounds.

NSL-TV has caught up, and the first five rounds have been uploaded. Round 5 is currently featured on the leaderboard, the earlier rounds of the meet can be found at the separate NSL-TV page.

The weather is much better than expected on Thursday morning, and the 4-way teams have already resumed the competition. The ten rounds will most likely be completed today.

FAI Anton Malevsky Memorial International Cup 2007 4 - 6 July 2007, Stupino - Russia The NSL News coverage of the Malevsky Cup 2007 is brought to you with the help of:

The scores of rounds six and seven did not change much on the leaderboard. Airspeed Odyssey is still far ahead of the rest of the field, Team Fastrax and Sky Panthers battle for the second place and the $10,000. Black Cat is further behind the other top teams than expected.

The scores and the videos of the last two rounds on Wednesday indicate that Airspeed Odyssey took it a little bit easier after the sprint through rounds three, four and five. The Sky Panthers were able to tie Airspeed's 24-pointer in Round 6. However, Odyssey was still the only team that completed 25 points within working time, one point was deducted for an infringement at the 17th point. Fastrax lost the very last Monopod in working time and ended up with 22 points. Both Russian top teams had clean rounds.

Airspeed Odyssey gave the other teams even more room to catch up in Round 7. The Sky Panthers completed the highest number of points in time (22) but lost two point on the first page. However, Team Fastrax and even the Russian team Crossroads both tied Airspeed's 21-pointer for the highest score of the round.

Craig Girard did not confirm that his team slowed down with energy or pace level in Wednesday's last two rounds. He explained that both sequences did not allow to create a similar momentum as in the earlier rounds: "It's all about momentum. Each sequence has a different rhythm that allows to create great momentum or not."

The NSL News plans to meet with the Odyssey line-up for an interview after the completion of the meet. Craig Girard promised to provide more feedback about his team's current strategies. He was excited to see that results of the breakthrough to a new performance level at the World Challenge 2007 can already be seen. Airspeed Odyssey is on the way to post a new record average for a 10-round competition. Black Cat currently holds this record with a 24.1 average at the Russian Nationals 2006.