I attended the World Championships in Brazil, in 2005, as a member of the Canadian Paragliding World Team. That was my first time competing at a high-level, international competition, and it whet my appetite for more. So when I heard the 2007 World Championships were to be held in Manilla, Australia (a place I’ve always heard referred to with lots of enthusiasm and awe) I started getting ready.

First off this meant being accepted to the 2007 Canadian World Paragliding Team. For 2007, there were 3 spots allocated for Canada: 2 male and 1 female. Given that I am one of the few female pilots flying competitively in Canada, my chances were quite good of getting on, but I also wanted to be current with my competition skills. So I made sure to attend many comps in anticipation: both Canadian comps and also US and international comps.

After 2 years of competitions, I got the good news that I was accepted to the Paragliding World Team, along with Keith McCullough (Calgary) and Will Gadd (Canmore). Since I have attended a previous World Championships before I was asked to be the Team Captain in addition to being an actual flying pilot (in many countries, the Team Captain is an additional person, who doesn’t necessarily fly in the competition, who focuses on logistics and basically takes the stress off the flying pilots).

So with that in mind I got the Team ready for the upcoming World Championships: buying plane tickets, paying the entry fees on time, arranging retrieves, accommodations, co-ordinating with the USA Team (since we are all good friends and like to fly together, and we were sharing things like accommodations and retrieves), and making sure things were all ready for when we all arrived in Australia.

As part of getting ready, the entire Team did a massive amount of fund raising to help defray the costs of the competition. We did a 50/50 draw and ended up raising $6600, half of which went to the Team. We also raised some private funds from Columbia View Homes (who own the Nicholson LZ in Golden, thanks guys!) to help pay for our collective entry fees. We also raised funds from HPAC, HPAAC, and AHPA. So when it came time to actually head to Australia we were in pretty good shape.

Once in Australia we got ready for the first competition, the World XC Series Challenge. This is a 4-part series, taking place in various venues around the world, meant to promote open distance XC flying. We were using this competition as practise for the World Championships, since none of us had flown in several months (dratted Western Canadian winters!), and we were all new to Manilla flatland flying.

It was quite the change from dark and dreary weather in BC and Alberta to hot, sunny, and long days in Oz. But we were up to the challenge and took to the skies. The flying in Manilla is mostly flatland flying, although you take off from a 300m hill called Mt. Borah. This hill is owned by Godfrey Wennes, a local pilot, and has multiple launches facing west, east, northeast, and south, and a 2 wheel drive road up to it. Up top it’s mostly flat, with a few trees, and is entirely top-landable. But most people don’t top-land since most flights from Mt. Borah (outside the school ones) are XC!

XC potential from Mt. Borah is excellent (Godfrey has flown 335 km from here) due to the favourable winds, lack of airspace restrictions (except for due south, and you can detour around that), lots of thermal-producing fields, very hot and dry conditions, and lots of roads to follow for easy retrieve. Cloudbase is typically 2500-3000m ASL, although you can get to 5000m ASL after a spell of particularly hot and dry weather.

During this competition we had to deal with some unstable weather (storm cells you had to either fly around, or land before getting too close), but by and large it was a very successful competition. Both Keith and I achieved personal best XC distances during this XC comp (I flew 151 km one day, my previous best had been 138 km in Golden); indeed most of the field had personal best XC distances! It was good practise for the Worlds, but we didn’t know the weather was to change radically, and the conditions we previously enjoyed were about to end.

XC LZI was flying my new AIRWAVE Magic 4 XS , which is a custom-built glider by Bruce Goldsmith (I had test-flown a Magic 4 at the Rat Race the previous year, and loved it, but it was a bit too big for me so Bruce agreed to make me a XS). I had only received the glider recently and didn’t have any airtime on it, so I was rather conservative with it for the first few flights. But when I became more comfortable on it I began to push the envelope, using a lot of bar between thermals, and throwing it around when I needed to turn tight. It’s certainly a lot faster than my previous glider (UP Trango 2), and I can make use of the increased available speed a lot easier due to the extremely light speed bar pressure (due in part to the pulley setup Bruce designed, and also the fact that’s it’s a 3-line glider with race lines, with less drag than a traditional 4-liner).

By the time the World Championships arrived the weather had turned to mostly wet. Up to now Manilla had been under drought conditions for the past 10 years or so, and the weather gods decided now would be a good time for the drought to end. Of course the farmers were ecstatic with the rain, but not good news for all the international competition pilots who had showed up for the next 2 weeks.

The flying was not the greatest, especially compared to the XC Open we had just flown in, but it was still enjoyable. The part most of us didn’t enjoy was the massive start gaggles that tended to set up. A bit of background for those not familiar with competition flying: There are several types of starts: the race start, which can be either an air start (everyone starts at once in the air at a predetermined GPS location, the most common type of start in paragliding competitions) or a ground start (everyone starts at once from the ground, only achievable when the launch is large enough to allow every competitor to lay out and launch more or less at once, usually in the Alps); and the elapsed time start, which can be multiple start gates (eg. every 15 minutes a race starts and you choose which one to be in) or individual starts (everyone starts at their own time, whenever they cross the start line). But no matter which start is chosen by the task organizers, a start gaggle is pretty much inevitable. Usually this isn’t a problem, as the gaggles can spread out and there is plenty of lift, but for most of this competition, the lift was light and weak enough that the start gaggles didn’t spread out, and you ended up with 150 pilots in the same piece of air. Mid-airs were pretty common, and after witnessing a few of them, we decided we didn’t want any part of them and stayed on the ground to avoid the start gaggle whenever possible. This is usually a tactical mistake since it means you are potentially behind when the start happens (if you get delayed on the way to the start, and cut your launch time too fine), but we’d rather be safe than on-time.

Other than the start gaggle snafus, the flying was pretty good, although it was not race-style flying. The weather conditions were too weak to allow racing amongst pilots, and survival (staying in the air) was paramount. So it was not what the World Championships are really about (racing), and this showed in the daily results. It was very hard to be consistent in the light and weak conditions, and many pilots who made goal one day didn’t make goal the next day. In fact there were only a couple of pilots (or maybe just one) who made goal every day. Bruce Goldsmith made goal every day on his Airwave FR3 and ended up winning the overall competition, ousting the traditional Swiss, Austrians, Germans, and the like from the 1st place on the podium. Way to go Bruce!

The Canadian Team did pretty well for this World Championships…as a nation we moved up several spots to 19th (out of 39 nations), which is the best Canada has placed in a Paragliding Worlds. And I did better than my last showing at a Worlds (114th vs. 140th!), so I was pretty happy as well. I loved flying in Manilla when the conditions were on, and will certainly go back again for some more epic flying.

As for my personal thoughts, this is the second Worlds I have attended, and I’ve seen the same things twice now. The politics of the event are initially fascinating, and as the Team Captain I got to see a lot of it. But after several days of constant bickering by the same teams over things I could only see as minutiae, I became a bit disenchanted with the whole thing. It seems that the whole concept of flying for fun has gone out the window when it comes to the World Championships. OK, it is the Worlds after all and is important, but in the end we are all pilots out to have a good time. I wish at these events we could get past all that and just show up, fly, have a good time, and not have to worry about some nation feeling disadvantaged by another nation and creating stress. Apparently this isn’t the case with the PWC series, and is rather an issue that only crops up with big FAI events (especially category 1 events like the World Championships or the Europeans). Maybe that’s why I’m thinking of trying some PWC events in the near future, to see if they are just as politically-intense as the Worlds have been, or are more stress-free. But one thing’s for sure, I’m certainly going to continue competing, both locally and internationally!