Mads Syndergaard reports from check-in – and checks out the competition and potential winners…
A zoomable 360-degree view of the main square in Piedrahita in Spain
We had the registration process yesterday, and any pilot who didn’t come with a strong determination to be good about it must have struggled hard – for my own part, having had stressful registration days in these events before, I came with sooo much love, goodwill and patience that nothing could have brought me out of it, although by the end of the day I must admit it was all spent.
We did a full four hours queuing for the paperwork, and a lot of pilots, ie those who went to the glider check before it was decided that the glider checks weren’t necessary after all, queued there for another hour or two.
In people less mellow than my fellow pilots this would surely have caused a riot. For my own part I was lucky to be in the line with Melanie from the US, and we had a good laugh or two along the way.
With registration day there and gone, now is the time to think of who is who in this event. Let’s start with the girls: Petra is here on a Boom 8, Renata is here on a Mercury two-liner, and Seiko and Elisa are on R11s (I think) – Kirsty Cameron (GB) also has one, and in my book it will be between these five. But if I had to put a name on it it’d be Seiko.
The boys are trickier – with everyone now on competitive wings the field is wide open, and it could well go to someone we haven’t seen much of before.
In a Worlds event consistency is the name of the game, and some of the very strong pilots in this field are possibly going to struggle with that. Pilots I know to be very consistent are Jean-Marc Caron, Russ Ogden, Luca Donini, maybe David Ohlidahl, Stefan Wyss, Torsten Siegel, perhaps Frankie Brown – but these are just the “old” names.
“New” names that I know to be very strong could be Sergio Sampaio, Marcus Malmqvist, Jamie Messenger, Michael Sigel, and you can see that this exercise is now becoming futile because there are already a great number of very good pilots that I haven’t mentioned, and who are also on competitive wings, and they can all win if they manage to keep their heads cool!
So I’ll just sign out from here now and go shopping for lunch-pack stuff instead – it looks like we’re going up the hill once the fighting over the airspace issues at the team-leader briefing has abated. More to come later :-).
• Who’s flying for your country? Check out the pilot list
• Follow the action through the official website: www.piedrahita2011.com
Mad Syndergaard is author of Flying Rags for Glory: An A-Z of Competition Paragliding
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