Comp 6 The World Cup Super Final. Turkey.

This was a veritable Who’s Who of competition Paragliding. Every person you spoke to was the Champion of something. The Team member of their country, the designer or test pilot top wings. It was an honour to fly amongst them, until the sods starting crashing into me!! There were mid airs all the time on every task; the flying was aggressive to the degree of stupidity. The launch mountain was cross wind so the R10 dance was a sight to see. Our own Adrian Thomas tripped on launch, hitting a rock face first, missing task 1 and getting 40 stitches in his upper lip for good measure. He soldiered on, but I’m sure he was suffering, especially when he had a mid air on task 6, completely the other pilots fault.

The task setting was questionable to say the least, with strong winds forecast; they tasked us back into 40kph winds!! With classic skies downwind, it was very upsetting to have to turn back into wind, pushing into lee side rotor above shaded trees!!

All in all, 7 tasks of varying quality revealed a worthy winner in the very friendly French pilot Yann Martail. With France winning the countries cup and Petra Slivova winning the women’s list.

For Team UK. Jamie Messenger took a fantastic 7^th, while I was next Brit with a 21^st J. Russ Ogden 51^st, Adrian Thomas 64^th, Craig Morgan 84^th and John Ellison 86^th. Which out of 135 of the Worlds best paraglider pilots is no mean feat.

This is what you have to do to make the British Paragliding Team! 5 or 6 top comps and do very well in them. It’s a lot of dedication and even more skill and bravery.

Even if this does make Skywings, it’ll probably be skipped over to read about someone’s first 10k XC or ridge run in Wales J But to me it’s been great, and the R10? It turned out to be a beauty. Now, planning for the Worlds next year, oh and the PWC’s. The Super Final will be in Mexico! Oh and the British Championships!!!

Here we go again!