Spotlight Awards 2019

Spotlight Awards

Region 9 Europe celebrates the spotlight award winner and the the clerk of the year for 2019. As I pointed out at the regional banquet in Legano / Italy, this show season is the season of the silent people. Our two awards go to such people and I'm very happy that we have them in our region.


Spotlight award winner 2019 is Marika Lahti from Finland

I personally know Marika because of her perfectly groomed Persian cats on our shows in Europe. But there is more behind this lady. Marika is a cat person from almost the beginning of her live. At an age of 15 she got her first Persian cat, a blue cream. Her first litter was born in 1990. In the beginning she started with showing in Fife, as most of us in Europe. The surprising thing is, that her first show cats were household pets, which were later on registered as novices in the European Shorthair breed. At this time, while showing in Fife, Marika was very successful and did several best cat wins on Fife shows. Here I don't want to forget to say, that this shows sometimes had 1.200 entries on a weekend. After I got this Fife information from her my question was " When did you decide to go with CFA? ". Yes, all went back to this CFA information shows Samu Mollberg and his team held in 2007 and her first real CFA show was in May 2008. Marika said, that she was hooked by the atmosphere in this show and this is exactly what many other people over here in Europe say when you ask this question. Actually Marika shows exclusively in CFA and mainly in Finland. Let talk about the reasons Marika deserves the spotlight award 2019 for region 9 Europe. Did most of you know that Marika does our booklet for the regional awards banquet since 2013? She is the one who works on this not easy thing to get everything in order. She feels very honored to do this and, of course, she loves to do it. I know she will go on with this job and her wishes for the future are having the material in time, so that she can do this one whole week job in one piece, because its always the last missing photo making the problems. Another question was " What do you like most on this job? " and it was no surprise to get this answer: I like to create something pretty and more professional looking publications for CFA Europe. I think that visually is important. Thank you Marika, I think I can say this for most of the European CFA people, you are exactly the right person to do this and we all are honored having you.

Clerk of the year 2019 winner is Mireille Gobel form Belgium

Another very silent person in our fancy is Mireille and at this point I want to make clear that not the one who did the most clerking during the season ( this is also important and necessary, so that my strongest thanks go with these clerks ), this time its the one who did extra homework. 05.07.2019 13:28 Newsletter July 2019 - part 1 Can you imagine that Mireille startet with breeding Siamese cats? The change came in August 2007, at that time she got her first Abyssinian and started a new breeding program and, no surprise to me, she carries on some old 0380 Aby lines. Mireille is a certified chief ring clerk in CFA, the treasurer of Felinus International Cat Club in Belgium and did the entry clerk job for the last couple of shows of her club. But the main reason for being clerk of the year is her work behind the curtains. Mireille developed a new scoring program on the computer for CFA shows and shares this and the information with exhibitors, so that everybody can have the information on how many points her / his cat made in this particular show. She also developed a breed summary sheet for the use of our chief ring clerks and made it available for her colleges. Thank you Mireille, for working for our region, always loyal and reliable with friends and colleges.