World Salsa Championships
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As with sports such as boxing, there are several salsa competitions that lay claim to be the World Salsa Championships.
The oldest is probably the Mayan World Salsa Championships, hosted by Club Mayan in LA. (See http://www.clubmayan.com). Publishing video-clips on this site did much to publicise salsa, especially LA-style. For many years Johnny Vazquez dominated this competition before relocating to teach throughout Europe.
The 1st Official World Salsa Championships, was organized by the International Dance Organization or IDO IDO Website Isaac and Laura Altman the 2000 IDO World Salsa Champions later formed the World Salsa Federation [1] in 2001 which became the recognized World Governing Body for Salsa Dancing and the Official World Salsa Championships. The WSF is recognized by the Amateur Athletic Union, the largest amateur sporting organization in the U.S. with over 800,000 members. Isaac and Laura were successful in bringing Salsa and DanceSport as official sports in the Junior Olympic Games since 2002.
In 2003, 2004 & 2005 a British Couple, Chris Marques & Jaclyn Spencer aka Cuban Groove won the World Salsa Championships 3 times consecutively, a first ever. External reference article from Dance publication
This led them to becoming the only non Cuban dancers to ever perform at the Cabaret Tropicana in Havana see the TV Broadcast here, Cuba since it's birth 75 years ago. The performance was of such magnitude that CNN, Euronews, Reuters and many more agencies broadcast their performance throughout the world.
They are now Choreographers for programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing and their many affiliated programmes "Dancing with Stars" BBC'S Website throughout the world.
2005 saw the birth of an alternative World Salsa Championship
The World Salsa Championships are annual Salsa competitions held in Las Vegas. The championships were fathered by Salsa promoter Albert Torres and first held in 2005; the second championships are to be held December 14-16, 2006. Competitions are held in four categories, namely On 1, On 2, Cabaret and Groups.
