Mark Hayman reflects on the memorial of Xavier Murillo, technical director and passionate, hardworking frontman of the Paragliding World Cup

Bad weather is forecast till the end of the competition so Mark flies home. An event on the plane leaves him astounded as to one individual’s perception of risk and priorities in a crisis.

The fourth task was cancelled before it even began, due to threatening conditions and a bad forecast. The weather then improved as soon as everyone stood down. Safety committee member Mark explains how these difficult decisions are made.

Despite some worrying incidents elsewhere in the comp and his ongoing concerns with comp wings, Mark has a great day on his serial class wing, and more positives than negatives.

Task two, and Mark is getting into the ‘flying for fun’ thing, and has decided that smiles beat trophies, any day.

Mark flies his serial class paraglider for the first time in the first task, and finds it very different to the hotships he’s used to.

It’s raining and, with six Brits holed up in a small house in Slovenia, this can only mean one thing – banter

A British Paragliding Team member has resigned over two-line glider safety

Well it’s all over and this will be my last post. Thanks to all those who have left positive comments about my blog.  I’ve never done any sort of writing before and I have to say that, weary, dirty and tired though I was at the end of each day I have thoroughly enjoyed tapping [...]

For my last blog I thought I’d talk about the ‘S’ word.  That thing that paragliding competitors never really want to address.  Safety.

Well we’ve come to the end of the 11th Paragliding World Champs. I’ve just got back from the closing ceremony and need some kip so I’ll just report briefly here that Andy Aebi from Switzerland won the event to become World Champion and Elisa Houdry from France becomes the Female World Champion.

Well I had my first really bad day of the competition today when I ran out of time to complete the task.  In short, I bombed out. After walking for an hour to find a road during which I got fairly lost I grumpily presented myself for the GPS download, was rude to the Meet [...]

The end of the competition is in sight with only two task days left to go.  This is a good job as exhaustion is rapidly setting in amongst quite a few of the competitors. For those reading this blog who think it must be a fantastic jolly to come away to nice country like Mexico [...]

Today we had to do Team Photos at launch. Now, I understand why we have to do these for sponsors and as a record of our participation in the event and, of course, I’m only too happy to pose for the cameras.  However, squeezing a portly 41 year old man into a white lycra top [...]

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get the hang of this paraglider racing malarkey. Today was a typical example of the highs and lows you experience on a World Championship task which ended in a sort of a high – getting to goal – and a sort of low – doing it too slowly.

There was no task today. We found this out as we presented ourselves at 9am for the transport to launch.  At the team leader’s meeting earlier in the morning a request had been received from several teams to have another day of rest due to Stefan’s accident on Friday and to dedicate this in his [...]

It’s rest day as we are half-way through the World Championships and after 6 days of flying coupled with the dreadful accident yesterday pretty much all the pilots were happy to spend the day loafing about reading, emailing and having very long lunches.

Some of you may have already heard that Stefan Schmoker, one of the Swiss Team Pilots, sustained fatal injuries during today’s task. Stefan and the rest of the field were flying in a perfectly normal place where we fly every day and nobody was on the bar or pushing hard near the ground.  In fact [...]

The Brit Team has had a bad day. After storming round in the lead gaggle all day it all went very wrong in the last 15k because we all got stuck and watched the chasing pack fly over our collective heads to take the glory and more importantly all the points.  By the time we’d [...]

Sorry for the lack of a blog yesterday.  I got back to start writing and was so tired that I fell asleep whilst typing.  I woke up at 3am with a cold cup of tea next to me, all the lights on and about 20,000 full stops on the page as I’d obviously dozed off [...]