Hi there, everybody. Welcome to the 50th episode of Cloudbase Mayhem. I can't even believe this. What was started as a lark a couple years ago has turned into a real thing, and I have you to thank for that. Got an exciting show for you today. It's quite a bit different. We left our typical trajectory and talked to Dave Snowden, a couple pilots down in Australia. We've got a lot of listeners in Australia. You've got to thank you all for that. Reach out to me and say they wanted to hear from Dave because he was real instrumental in the Australian Worlds team this year, and I thought that was pretty interesting because we in the U.S. have really struggled at the Worlds all the time. Every other year they have the Worlds, and it's hard to compete with the Swiss and the Germans and the French who have massage therapists and real coaches and real training, and we never get together.
We go to the Worlds and typically kind of get trounced for no lack of talent, but Dave and Brian Webb identified that they've got a lot of talent down in Australia, and they didn't even send a team to 2015, and they got together and decided what can we do about this and put together a really solid program down there. They developed the Australian Paragliding Squad, and they talk about flying psychology. And anyway, we talk a lot about competitions in this one. Dave's got a ton of experience, been flying for over 25 years, talks a lot about his mentors in England before he moved to Australia and just how they've been so successful. The Australian team did really well at the Worlds this year.
It was a lot of fun watching them. That was actually during the X-Ops. I wasn't watching the Worlds during it, but got caught up afterwards. So yeah, this is really about competition flying. If you're interested in comps, if you're interested in psychology of comps. And yeah. If you're interested in how they work and how they're good to develop training and develop skills, then give it a listen. I think you'll really enjoy it. One little bit of housekeeping, Miguel Gutierrez, who organizes all the comps down in Mexico, he's probably done more comps than anybody. That team, El Hasta El Hombre team, is by far the most experienced in running comps. They are just amazing. He's running the pre-PWCA at a new site, Colima, down in Mexico. In early December.
And I just wanted to put that out there to you. The website is pwcamexico.com. And right now you can sign up for that and the Monarca in January for $400, which is just ridiculous for both of them. So head over to that site. Really cool to be able to go fly a new area. We always go to Valle de Bravo, which is fantastic. But this is a new site. Pretty excited about that. I'll be down there. We'll be showing North and North at both those. So give Miguel a call, sign up, and then hope to see you down in Mexico this year. If you're getting something out of this show, this is the 50th episode. I can't believe it. If you're just discovering it, you've got to go back and check out. We've had so many amazing talks with some of the best pilots in the world.
Russ Ogden and Will Gadd. We just did a great weather show with Hansa. So much talent there. Andra Proshaska and Aaron Durogati, two-time Superfinal winner. Chrigel Maurer, right after the exit. So go back, check those out. Hope it makes you send it better and be a safer pilot. We've got some great shows coming up. All we ask for is a buck a show. And if you can't support us financially, there are many other ways to do so. And you don't have to. This is free. This is supposed to be free. This is just about spreading knowledge. But one way you could, I'm looking for somebody that can help us out with social media. I'd love to get this out to more places like paragliding forum and the various clubs around the world. It would probably take 10 or 15 minutes. 15 minutes a show to just go on and hit copy and paste and put this up in a bunch of different places.
If you're interested in that, give me a shout. That'd be an awesome way to support the show. That'd be really great. I'd be very grateful. But it's also, it's free for a purpose. So if you can't support us financially, I totally understand. Share it with your friends. Send it in an email. Put it in a blog. And if you can't do any of those things, I totally get it. That's fine. We've had a lot of people support us recently on Patreon. I really appreciate that. That's where you can find a lot of bonus episodes and stuff. And the soon to be coming, I keep promising this, but I finally have been able to tap in back in with Chrigel. He's been super busy moving house. We're going to have that bonus episode up with him, which will be a lot of fun. And so, yeah, here it is. Please enjoy this talk with Dave Snowden.
Dave, awesome to have you on the show. I really appreciate this. I know it's hard to coordinate when we're on different sides of the planet. You're over in Australia. And it's getting late. It's getting late over here in Ketchum. But I'm glad we made this work. Welcome to the mayhem. And I'm excited to talk to you. Before we started recording there, you said a couple of things that really caught my eye. One, you've been at this game for 25 years. So why don't we start there? Give us the resume version of your flying background.
Hi, Gav. Yeah, thanks for having me along. This is quite an interesting thing for me to be able to. Be involved in. Yeah, 25 years of flying. Well, where do you start? Is that all that is? Well, if you can tell your story in five minutes, it's pretty boring. But yeah, I mean, 25 years of flying. Started flying back in the UK in mid Wales, actually. Just a group of us from work. We decided that our climbing days and our windsurfing days and our mountaineering days needed a little bit more colour, if you like, and saw this flying game. My story when I started, actually, was when I was actually doing a route on Snowdon, well, doing a few routes, and I was actually caught in a rockfall on a ledge halfway up a pretty hard route.
And the rockfall caused a little bit of a damage to one of my hands. And as I looked up, I saw two paragliders flying above me, and I thought, well, that's a much safer sport, because basically, you don't get any rocks falling on your head.
So that's the only, this is a very unique, I haven't heard this version of getting into paragliding. I've heard a lot of ones, getting caught in rockfalls.
I didn't realise at the time that we can have the same velocity as rocks sometimes. True.
Anyway, so yeah, I guess things progressed from there. And we sort of signed up with a... A local school, but that was early 90, and 1990, and paragliding was just coming in. We'd had, you know, so we just jumped on the bandwagon with it. There was a course structure to it, but we also brought into our attitude of flying a little bit of a maverick attitude that, because the instructors seemed like they were developing their curriculums and such like as well. So alongside that, we developed our own as well. So we were actually out free-flying before we were qualified, and having a lot of very interesting incidents along the way there.
So, yeah, we carried on with that. And then, yeah, eventually, then there was a competition circuit started in the early 90s with the British Championships, and I was watching that from the background, and I thought, well, that's great. You know, that's something else. That's something else to drive for. And living in North Wales, I had access to... Some really beautiful sights around Snowdonia, a magnificent place to fly, but it was actually localised, the weather we had to deal with, as everybody does around the world. But we were getting some airtime. So then, as the competition structure started to develop through the 90s, I came in there and I was always, and still am, pretty much one of the also-RAMs in the competition ladders.
But, yeah, we sort of developed through that. And used the competitions as a stepping stone. And that got us around the UK a lot more in terms of visiting sites, so we could see a lot more of what was available to paragliding and then the extensions of that. And because I was an ex-alpinist, and then the Alps were the next stage, so getting out to fly in the Alps. And, of course, the competitions were just an awesome structure to tap into. So, to be part of that environment and watch and develop underneath some of the great names of the 90s. I was just going to say,
so, rattle off some mentors. I'm thinking, like, Jim Mallinson and Bob Drury and John Sylvester. Is that the right era?
Yeah, absolutely, pretty much. Yeah, a couple of those were a bit later than sooner. John was just, well, John lived two kilometres away from where I lived, and I flew with him in Snowdonia quite a lot. And, in fact, I shared an expedition with him out to Pakistan later on in 2000 and something as well. That's another story. But, yeah, so the actual mentors, the names there are people like Robbie Whittall, Jocky Sanderson. These are all actually comp pilots back then. Bruce Goldsmith and, you know, all these guys. John Pendry. These guys were the top of the tree there. They were the top of the... They were the boys' club, really. And it was really quite difficult, a lot, being an individualistic sort of pilot, to be able to tap into that and get to the top level.
But it didn't take long to realise that you just had to be bloody good. And I was always sort of OK. So... But there was other people that came along around the same time, like Bob Drury. And several other pilots who actually developed as well. And they were able to drop in with the top tier of the guys. And I remember Bob being dragged around Europe for a full season by John Sylvester. And, you know, he came out to that glowing in terms of his paragliding experience. And, you know, he had that drive and verve and everything that the...
Yeah. A good, solid, top-level pilot has to succeed. And he's taken that to great levels. He's also become directly involved in the sport, as have all the other pilots. You know, Bruce running his own business, et cetera, et cetera. You know, tremendous in-depth involvement with the sport. Whereas I was sort of teared down and coming at it, not quite as intensely. Couldn't really get or didn't really get involved in the industry of paragliding. So, therefore, I was... Because I was basically,
you know, just a working guy with a family, trying to make ends meet and spending my last cents and a few credit... Burning a few credit cards going out to comps. So that development... That development was, you know, pretty... Pretty average, I would say, in competitions throughout. But as things have progressed in time as well, and age is one thing, and the general attrition of other pilots around the competition scene, and I've carried on with that, and I've maintained a competition presence for 25 years, right, to the 2000s, as well as other expeditions. I started doing things like pilot mentoring, pilot development,
and seeing all the time that, you know, what is holding competitions back? What are holding competitors back? And some of it is skill development. Some of it is position that those individual pilots are in from a personal point of view, not being able to get out to more higher-level comps to actually develop the skills. And developing that, and I've tried to come along with that. Well, I have come along with that. One of the things is I've tried to push a lot of sponsorship into paragliding, directly and indirectly, helping others develop their sponsorship strategies and such like, and trying to go and grab dollars from outside of the sport to make competitions happen as well.
And one of the big things that I'm heading towards, I'm going through this chronology a bit backwards and forwards, but one of the things that really I'm heading towards is paragliding. Paragliding World Cup, which we're holding in Bright, which is now my hometown in Australia, in February. And that has taken three years to put together. And that's taken three years of my effort and a lot of other people's effort and a lot of other people's faith in what we're actually trying to achieve.
So let's pause on that for just a second because I'm curious. There's a whole bunch of questions I want to ask you about some of those things. But we had a World Cup here in Sun Valley in 2008. 2012. And it doesn't matter where the World Cup is. The pilots pay a certain fee. And for us here in Sun Valley, where we have huge, we fly huge distances, typically it's one way. We're usually going downwind. And so the retrieves are really nightmarish. And it was pretty much impossible for the organizer, a good friend of mine, Mike Fowle, to not lose a lot of money. Basically, because the World Cup, because the PWC,
what they charge is what they charge. And so you're going to get X and then Y needs to be made up through what you're talking about, through media or sponsorship or some other way. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Are you trying to make it something that's sustainable? Because basically, it was a great event. Everybody had a blast. Guy Anderson disappeared. It was a pretty wild comp. But it was, you know, I think that people would love to come back here and race, but we could never figure out how to make it work.
Right. Well, now, I say it's been three years in development. It's been in ideals and ideas for 10 years, 20 years, in fact, because we had a World Cup here in 1998. That happened. That worked. That actually. That actually held a bit of cash in hand after the event as well. Now, it is exactly what I'm talking about for this coming event, because the three-year development has really been chasing finance. It was pretty obvious that the competition fees will not cover the extortionate amount of money it actually costs to run these competitions.
And there was no way that I wanted to be tapping into competition. Well, asking pilots or tapping into the pilot pocket indirectly or directly. By that, I mean through clubs, through the main organization, the HGFA and such like. I really didn't want to go there because competition is an aspect of paragliding, but not the whole thing. And if I'm tapping into things like the HGFA funding, the Hang Gliding Federation of Australia funding, there is a small amount of funding available. But it usually gets spent on competition fees for overseas competitions for really top-level pilots. And that's fair enough. I completely agree with that.
But to actually back in a major way. Now, I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars, pushing five figures, $100,000, to be able to run this event. And there is no way that I was going to go and tap into those guys and ask for that sort of cash. But by digging a bit deeper, we could actually get into some regional funding and some state funding. Now, jumping through all the hoops of that, we got into a position where we could make an application
through accreditation of even our local club who are generally running or the labeled organizer of the event and tap into the Shire funding, that's regional funding, state funding, and possibly federal funding. So, this is where it developed. But all these applications take 18 months to two years to come through. There's so many hoops to jump through in terms of getting accreditation. And one of the accreditations was actually getting the club recognized almost at national level by having accreditation from the tiers above us. So, we were pushing it from the bottom with no authority, well, not the same authority that the top tier would have.
And the top tier didn't have the drive, the verve, and the... and the passion to be able to make it happen. So, if we'd have handed it to our national sporting organization to run, it would have fallen flat. They wouldn't have had the drive to actually make it, bring it all together. But a good friend, Brian Webb, is my competitions manager for the actual PWC. And he's great. He's very, let's say, he's a bit like my headmaster. He'll tell me when things are right and tell me when things are wrong. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Think a bit out of the box and go off on a maverick run sometimes. And, you know, I'll fly off into the abyss sometimes when I should be stopping in Thermalink, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, Brian's a great pilot and been around a long time and knows that scene really well. Well, I look forward to hopefully coming down and racing with you guys in February. And I wish you the best of luck with that. I think we could talk a lot about that event. But I kind of understand where you're taking that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's one thing that it would be totally remiss of me to not ask you about. You mentioned before that you're kind of getting into mentoring and coaching. I'd love to talk about that.
That history comes through from development of the Australian paragliding squad. And I retain a management position with the Australian squad. Now, I cannot take any credit. Well, I can't take the credit of being. I can't take the credit of being the Australian squad coach. What I am trying to do is facilitate a position for those that squad who represent the top 20 pilots, ranked pilots in Australia, a facilitator to help them achieve their goals and help the Australian ranking get as high as it possibly can in the WRPS. Now, from a coaching point of view, yes, I'm the Victoria coach for the squad.
I'm not. I'm not the overall coach. The overall coach in the first two years of the squad was Brian. And we developed a lot of initiatives with Brian, really skilling up our squad pilots to get to a level where they were internationally competitive.
How are you tackling that? Because some of the things you even said there are completely foreign to us as a U.S. team. You said a coach. We don't have a coach. We said, you know, training. There's I mean, these are these are things that we know the Swiss and the Germans and the French take very, very seriously. But in the in the States, for example, it's just the Wild West. You qualify, you go. You know, there's there's no organization. There's no we had a very good friend of mine, Tony Lang, for years and years and years, raised a ton of money for the U.S. paragliding team, which was just a massive job. And hats off to him. It was it was incredible. But you sound like you're doing. You're doing quite a coordinated effort.
That's the key to it. Well, OK, I'll just do a couple of minutes on actually how the squad developed from scratch. And it was a recognition, really, that we didn't send a team to Colombia at all for the world. The world's, I think, back in 2015. And because we were very much as the states are now as New Zealand is, I've been helping them with escort structures as well. And that was great. And but it was still down to them and the panel as well to actually organize and send out the pilots to those events.
So we had this we had this failing that we hadn't actually sent a team, which was rather disconcerting. We looked at the national ranking table. And we were something like 38th on the national ranking, and it was pretty easy to see amongst our top pilots, and even the top 20 pilots, that we had the talent, or we had the potential talent, that wasn't being recognized through the FAI WRPS system, or of their skills. And one of the, and of course the biggest problem is we're in an isolated massive island, and it was difficult for our pilots to get overseas and see the value in going overseas, because you know, we've got this massive island where we've got some of the most wonderful flying terrain in the world.
You know, we're a nation of world records, in fact, so we've got, we had everything except we didn't, we, we were down the table. So they started looking into the point system and how the points were working, and how the development of, of, uh, how we could get further up that ranking. And the key to that was two things: firstly, increase the value of our domestic competitions, so that each individual Australian pilot would score more points doing exactly what they do from that competition, so
You're, you're saying, you're saying, make sure you get international pilots to those comps is
That there's two, two to that. Yeah, okay. The two keys that is drawing in international pilots, as you say, so we've got to become attractive to those. Now, we can become attractive in lots of different media ways in the paragliding community, and quite simply, we just—we just make sure everybody knows about us, where we are, and how good it is to fly here. That's great. We can bring pilots over. We—we can tout out our competition structures and say, you know, we're as good as anywhere else in the world. If you're not doing anything in January, February, December, January, February, March, then come to Australia. Because you get some great flying suddenly in the XC leagues. We were second only to Brazil. Quixadá, Quixadá is one site, well, three now.
One site in northern Brazil, flown there, fantastic place to fly. Easy XC 200ks is every day, minimum, marvellous. You can go and do that. We can do that in Manila. We can do that in Bright. We can do that in the Flatlands Toll. out at Deniliquin, where we're actually, we can just simply tow up and ping. You've got 400ks under your belt, we're gonna have a world record there. Well, we've got three world records out there, thanks to Seiko and, um, and Charlie coming out, um, but we can get Australians doing the same thing. Then we've got a development going on, then we've got access, uh, the our pilots are accessing it more. More pilots are going out to the flatlands, and then we've got a development flatlands on the XC flatland season and getting the the cross, big cross countries done.
Fantastic, so you said we're doing that, you said
You've got so, the so the first kind of the the first order of business was, okay, we got to make these comps more attractive to the international scene, so the points are higher, so our own Australian pilots can can be better ranked. Um, what about what part of that was was their skill development side of things? And then we've got the XC flatlands. Was there what what's what was step two, okay?
So, once we established that a lot more pilots could come over, then we get the the levels up on that. The step two into that was the skills development. To get the skills development, we had to become a little bit more cohesive in ourselves. Who are we coaching? Why are we coaching, uh, and to what ends? So, we then turned around and said, "We need to build a squad structure." So, I threw this on the table at one of our comps three years ago, and they all turned around and pointed the finger at me and said, "Well, if you want to do that, you manage that, and we'll see what happens." So, I went, "Oh geez, okay. Then, so if you're going to get something done in this world, do it yourself." So, I put down a whole structure of a whole squad structure of what we were going to do, what we were aiming to do, um, what we were, uh, how we were going to do it, and what was the outcomes.
And, uh, so we had basically a 15-point structure to a plan I'm
Fascinated, you know, I, I, it's kind of a, it's kind of a mirror into, you know, the, the back door, you know, into the back of the theater to see what's going on. You know, I mean, we all really want to know how the Swiss and French do it, and obviously, you, you've had some results. You guys did really well this year in the world. So yeah, take me, take me through what you think, um, really made a difference. What
We got this year is terrific, tremendous, and we haven't stopped yet. That is just start of where we're going, actually. But yes, um, so it was down to, first of all, who now we could try and, uh, we do actually, uh, do, uh, chats and talks at during comps, like most reasonable regional, international competitions do. So you get your top pilots talking about things covering the comp, but we wanted to be a bit more specific, and how to be more specific? So we came up with a number of pilots, um, based on the Australian ranking system from the previous year, which we would invite to the court squad. Now, there's no cost implication in this; it was all run by, by pilots for pilots to develop pilots.
And we realized that was obviously our top pilots had the plethora of knowledge within that, and they all had different pieces of knowledge and different um high-level skills within that. So we could, if we took the top 20, we would be able to tap into all that. So we said, well, we'll cut it off and we'll just say, right, the top—if you get in the top 20 of the nationals in the season, the next season you'll become a squad member. And by being the squad member, you're just signing up to a mentoring program. Oh my goodness, that threw that through the cat among the pigeons there, because we didn't have a mentoring program, but we had some highly skilled coaches in Brian Webb. We also could tap into other ex-champions, um, who contributed.
Craig Collins was superb from a skills development point of view as well. All these guys have got international experience, and of course, our top pilots were already pushing it out there at World Cups, FAI Cat Twos around Europe and such like. So we could pull on that as well. And the idea was actually to flow back. So what Brian then instigated as well, because we label Brian as the Australian coach, that's why I'm not taking to that claim because Brian's the man there, and what we did, we—we created this coaching structure based on regions. So, under Brian, we had a, um, a state coach for each one of the main states. So we had four states coaches as well. So, as, uh, so we had a bit of, uh, tier structure to it.
But what we did, we all get together on, um, on web chats, uh, about once a month, and we'd all get together, and we'd all get together in the first month in the first year. And then it filtered down, and we haven't actually done any this year because other things have taken precedence, uh, uh, but, um, in those web chats, we were talking about, um, we're talking about thermally techniques, uh, we're talking about competition tactics. We were talking about, uh, our glider control methodologies, uh, doing more SIVs, what the real nitty-gritty of it, and the psychological aspects of competition as well, which personally I is a really interesting subject in itself. We were dealing with the navigations, we're dealing with understanding topography and all the things, but we were dealing with it at a competition, a high level competition level, and
And you were dealing with it exactly how you—you were bringing in people like Brian to literally teach, so you guys would—you guys would grab a subject, say flying psychology, competition psychology, and and you do this kind of web chat once a month, or would you actually get together with with the squad and go flying and cover some of it now?
This is one of the problems that was actually, uh, highlighted out of doing this. We were doing it through web chats. We're very amiable people as individuals, but we're also, because we're top-level competition pilots, we're also very competitive. And what I was seeing and reading in the web chats, it was some people would give a lot of information, and they'd give information if they wanted, and and hopefully they were going to get some return information, which is going to balance it. Some of us were actually giving out a lot and not a lot was coming back, so we had this misbalance, and it was purely down to people absorbing things so they could use that information, get onto the level of the next guy, and be competitive in the next event.
So what we actually found was the web chats were really fantastic into understanding, understanding competition psychology and how we were playing the game when we weren't playing. And it actually developed into situations where we were going to events, and each one of our three domestic events are highly competitive between our top pilots and, um, you know, we do share, and it's breaking down that people that, so that they will share, so that everybody gets better. And as soon as everybody understands that if you make guy at number 10 better, it becomes, it becomes more competitive, so you've got somebody else to race with, you've got somebody else to gaggle with, and it actually enhances the whole, and it pushes the top guys even harder.
Would imagine there was quite a bit of built-in incentive as well, just I, I mean, imagine some of these things kind of happen just almost naturally, just by creating a squad. I mean, to me, it's like if there was a U.S. paragliding squad, I'd want to be on the squad, and so that would, that would help me train. I mean, even if there wasn't really money or anything, but it's like, it's kind of a niche club, right? It's, yeah, I imagine that was the first genius was just creating this thing, but
We didn't want to be elitist, right? We wanted to be niche, but not elitist, because it's not—it is about building those pilots for a better level for competition. Why do we want to get Australia up the national ladder? It's recognition in the world scene, but it's also recognition within Australia. Sure, you're dead right; it absolutely creates a situation we've got now another 20 pilots who are actually scrabbling to get to the squad level, because winning the national championships overall after three events is very, very difficult. Well, it isn't difficult for one guy because he keeps winning every year, but for the rest of it, it's really quite difficult. And that recognition you get, that recognition for like five minutes, yeah, and then ever, and you've only got that recognition amongst your small group of peers that happen to be at that competition.
Nobody else knows about it. It's great, it's a big ego boost, and you know you're developing, but what we want to do is build this ideal of strength, right? Down through the squad, so every one of the squad members has got a rung on the ladder to climb. That ladder and people outside the squad, and sure enough, we've got dozens of people and probably a lot more who would like to aspire to the squad. I'm mentoring one guy here in Bright at the moment who has got ideals of being in the squad, ideals have been in the squad to possibly make the team eventually. And and that to me is like the the drive and the incentive for people to be focused on a route to make them better in themselves for their own benefit.
So I think it benefits every individual, right? Through the plethora of pilots that we've got in in competition flying in Australia, so that exactly that. The strength is in its presence. Now, the reality of it is, how much does that squad actually gel and work together? And this is what I was trying to say before, is it works, and it works well, and it happens, and it it does develop, it does get people focused, it does get them thinking about what they're doing, it does open them out a little bit. And um, what we ended, what we what we end up doing is having little squads within the squad of pilots who get together of maybe three or four pilots who are actually in their peer group within the squad, and they develop.
And then you see these gaggles, if you like, developing. And we've got um, we had about, apart from the world's team, we had about eight of the squad out in Europe this year, and I was trying to mentor them. Well, I was mentoring them remotely, uh, following their competition, seeing what they were doing, right? See what they were doing wrong, uh, seeing how they were developing the competitions. And this was online, remotely watching their track logs and and such like fascinating stuff when you can't get out of the house and uh and um actually uh and helping them develop. And you could see these little groups, they're actually now pushing against the top tier of the squad, who are the team, um and um so yeah, it it pulls and it pushes at the same time.
That's that's awesome. I
Love it. Um, you, you've, you've mentioned, uh, I don't want to derail you too much here, but I'm gonna forget if I don't ask. You've mentioned a few times flying psychology, and I think that, that's one of the, one of the subjects we, we touch on on the show quite a bit, but um, we haven't in a while when it comes to competition. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, because you said earlier on that, you know, you, you weren't yourself, you know, a really top-tier pilot, but you obviously have been able to identify and be a mentor and be able to coach, and you know, you've been able to identify and be a mentor and be able to coach, and you know, you're, you're doing it remotely, which is awesome. So, what are, you know, give me the top three things? Like, what are, what are the top kind of three mistakes, or, or what are you, what do you find yourself revisiting with, with some of these pilots?
Like, "Listen, this is what you need to be thinking or doing." Is it totally independent? Is it different for everybody? Or are there some kind of baseline things that you, you find yourself using it?
Is individualistic. It is personal to individual pilots. It is very different how they approach the competitions, where they're coming from, from a comfort zone, where they want to go for, in in the comfort zone of the competition, what they actually want to achieve out of the competition, and these are infinitely variable. Um, but to hit on a few things, really, one of the things is mental agility. Everybody, everybody at that competition level, and of course these are guys going out and doing Cat Twos and and Worlds and Cat Ones, um, they're very, very focused pilots, and everything else, like most for most of us, everything else in the world stops apart from what they're actually doing.
Their mental agility can waver, and you can see it happening during their competition period, and it usually happens after about three days of back-to-back tasks when people start to waver off, and it's and it's allowing them to be able to express and get out of themselves away from the flying, sometimes so they come back a little bit stronger. Um, we do, we all know that 90 percent of flying skill is in the head, and that is where we're looking at this. So everything varies with each one. Um, I'd have to do a session with you, actually, Gavin, to be able to, yeah, please.
Sign me up. Well, you know, when as you're saying this, when I'm kind of thinking is, is that part of it? Must be. So, I spent a lot of time ski racing; that was my big thing growing up. And, you know, your your coach is everything, and a lot of it, like you said, everybody's totally individual. And as a cook, you're you're you you're a good coach by definition, by just recognizing what that person needs. And it sounds like that's what you're really doing. You know, for one person, it might be, "Listen, you need a break." For another person, it might be, "Listen, you need some focus." For another person, it might be, "Let's go have an ice cream and have a little cry." You know exactly
Yes, and it—and it happens in moments, and it happens in periods, and it happens. And you can, you know, analyzing track logs, for example. I'll give you one example: I had a female pilot, she's not Australian, she was in a major, in a major comp overseas, and uh, she was lagging a bit, and I just got a text message from her, and and it was like, "Yeah, okay, um, do you want a bit of help?" And she said, "Yeah." So I said, "Right, I've just been watching your track logs. You need to do this first of all." And this was—this was a technique. You are actually gliding towards thermals on half bar. You don't need look at all these. And then I—I broke it down, and I looked at her altitude barograph, and I was just saying, "Look, if you get from A to B at this speed, you will arrive at this thermal so much sooner.
You will climb so much better because, you know, it's a four-meter day, so you need to be spending more time in your thermals and less time on your glide. Go faster."
And the other thing that you're not doing is you're not maintaining bar all the way to the core of the thermal, when you're actually arriving with a massive gaggle of other pilots. Um, and you know, I gently put this to her next day, she goes out, she's doing three-quarter full bar between glides on a four-meter day, she's hitting the course on half bar, she's climbing out straight away, and bang, she goes up 40 places in the table. And it was little things like that, you know, that's just an example, that's a technique example. The headspace behind that had to develop, the headspace in that, so that she could actually be confident enough to roll a bar out to actually hit a thermal hard through the rough sections of the edges of the thermal to be able to climb into it.
And once you've got a... when we had to work on her headspace first, so that she got into that, and then bang, she got the reward, and then her whole rest of her comp just went upwards, then
That sort of thing is what the mentoring side of the competition, now we we try and do that within the squad quite a lot. One of the problems that we've got in the squad is we've got three major domestic events, uh, in Australia for the, uh, national championships. It's very difficult to do that mentoring within that competition to the rest of the squad because basically they're competing against each other and sometimes they get very insular; they won't take that sort of advice, um, and they won't. But they will actually do it by remote, if you like, by watching other people, by seeing what they're doing, by seeing what the development is, and knowing each other, who each other are as well, helps as well.
So our domestic comps remain very, very competitive, so it's hard to gel the squad in the that competitive environment. However, two years ago we, the squad, quite a lot of the squad went out to, um, the New Zealand Open, uh, which is actually Manila in Australia. That was a superb event. We could actually squad fly; we could actually take on the whole of the squad, basically take on the whole of New Zealand and beat them, and, um, we did. We thrashed them, uh, careful.
We've got some Kiwi listeners here.
Please just punch about that, okay? But that, that environment gives us a training environment, yeah. Now, of course, this, this whole squad things comes down to the time availability, you know. Most of every one of the squad are professionals in their own careers and such like as well. We're not professional pilots, but we do allocate a lot of time to our paragliding, and it's, it's really, you know, it's very difficult to encroach on more and more of their time, um, to, to do a week of mentoring and such like. We're changing that slightly, you know. Remember, this has only been going for three years now. I, in the back of my head, I've got like a five-year development plan going on, six to eight years, and I can see where we're going to be in eight years time.
I hope, where I would hope we'd be, but the whole thing. So, the first year was in, in really strong coaching, mentoring, the second less coaching, mentoring, and I've focused a little bit more on, on development of the level of the competition and increasing the numbers of international pilots and helping our pilots overseas a lot more this third and, and that was sort of an evolving year, so we started it. We've, we've, we've pushed pushed the boat out, we've, we've got it floating, we've gone on glide with it, if you like, uh, and now we're going to hit the next thermal. The next thermal is coming up shortly with, when we've got some fantastic results, so we've got to a stage where we can actually now market ourselves a little bit more, and the team came back and they have done that.
They've done, Carrie did a magnificent job with ABC radio, with TV and such like, and various articles, and Gareth did the similar sort of thing, and, and Steve and Philippe and Pete all contributed to various things, which is now given us a really good, strong position to actually go forward into a next stage. And the next stage is a lot of give back to the rest of the pilot community, which is a development of them. The squad starts to mean something to the rest of the community, and the rest of the paragliding community can benefit from that squad, but we're right in that cusp where we're just changing over now into that development.
Now, most of the squad can't see this development coming through, but, and we all share a similar vision, I believe, to articulate, articulating it is very difficult in that group environment, but everybody's benefiting. And now we've gone from 38th four years ago to now, I just checked the listing, with 15th, but we're, this is nations in the world, but we were up at 12th at one point. By the, by the end of this coming season, we should be aiming for a top 10 place, which is sustainable. We should be going into the worlds aiming at still the top five team and putting two pilots on podiums.
That is where I believe we should be going to in the worlds, and that is down to individuals. The squad is a structure of individuals, it's individual skills to get into that team, to get that team to build that team there, and making sure that the team is in a comfort zone when they are in the competition to carry on. We had a fantastic team gelling structure in Italy this year, and that's down to management from Dave Gibbs as well, did a fantastic job with them, and these individual pilots knowing each other and working with each other for an ultimate goal of our best chance of a podium was Kerry. It was a likely podium place for Gareth.
It was a potential podium place for the rest of the team. the team position was um really really strong so
Let me, let me ask you, let me, let me ask you a tough question then. Um, you know how, how are you guys going to compete with, you know, the Swiss and the French and the Germans? They have, with when they have so much more money. I, I, I've kind of, I've kind of, I've understand that it sounds like you're doing this because you just love flying. Um, but you know, without you and Brian, um, you know, is, is it sustainable? Is it, is it, uh, you know, not? I, I guess we're going to get back into the media and the sponsorship side of things, but um, you know, I think that, that's where, you know, over here in the U.S., I think we've got about the same number of pilots as you do in Australia. It's a vast place; you just don't have the visibility, uh, that you do in Europe.
You know, you don't have the structure, you don't have the infrastructure, you don't have the lifts, you don't have the access. You're very similar to what we are. How do you, how do you make this sustainable? Because at some point, people still have to get paid, well.
You know, I've grown up with that model. While I was, I'm an expert, and I grew up through trying to get into the British team. I hit the British team a couple of times, but they were on minor events; they weren't on the big events. As I say, I was sort of one of the first of the also runs.
I've just missed out, but you know, I did three seasons on the on the World Cup circuit and, uh, ended up with the top 50 world pilot at one point and, uh, slithered down the track since then. But so, but that has given me a vision of of what can happen and what does happen. And yes, the French, the Swiss, the German teams' massive structure, you know, and that is down to a lot of the drive from the coaching above to help these guys out and to do what they do. They, I mean, the French have their own academy of paragliding that is just fantastic, that's fully state funded. There is the key, the key is not to try and get the funding out of our guys; the key is trying to get the funding out of the state governments.
We are, our team is out there. Yeah, there are a bunch of recreational paraglider pilots, but they're a team of Australian, the Australian team going out to the world, they represented sport in Australia. We've got to get that recognition into the eyes of the government agencies who are dealing, dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to minor sports, and we'll always be a minority sport. They're dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to to, um, support, um, teams going out there. I don't believe we should be doing it from our own fund, from the pilots; it should be coming from that.
Now, there is a way of doing that, and that is the Olympics. As soon as we get recognition with our Australian Olympic Commission, properly, proper, by being an Olympic sport, we can tap into that funding. Now, that funding just doesn't just cover our little team that goes out of four pilot, five pilots who go out to do, uh, the Olympics, or it actually covers our team and structures. and infrastructure and equipment and training for the majority. So, how suddenly that funding can be used for all pilots who are going into competitions, that funding can be because they're all vying for a position, uh, on their team.
That funding can then filter down again to, uh, clubs and sites and infrastructure and development. We can then filter that funding down again to, uh, clubs and then put mentoring programs on, and and and such like, uh, for majority of parts. That's where that structure can actually lead us, but we've got a really long road before we actually get to Olympic, um, Olympic accreditation or the sport of paragliding into the Olympics, but That's something as a purely as an individual I've been chasing over the last year as well, um. And this is where I went out recently to, um, Asia to have a look at the test event for the Asian Games. The Asian Games is an Olympic accredited multi-event, and paragliding cross country and accuracy are in that event for Asia, so any listed Asian country can be part of that.
We had a problem, we had it, and that's fantastic. Now, that was a test event. There's been some problems with the test event, and it's not traditional cross country. Traditional cross country racing because of the conditions of the site and the fact that it's on a small thin island near the equator, which is, um, highly humid, really quite poor cross country flying with a launch that's 200 meters above the landing field. Max height was, um, probably 600 meters above landing at all times, so we had to think the box to make that thing happen.
We had a couple of, uh, civil representatives there, and, uh, we tweaked the whole thing around and made short circuit racing over from an elapsed time, and the thing worked. We were getting 800 point days because we tweaked the algorithm for the competition scoring a little bit. We'd, um, we ended up with 800 point days, which is great. We ended up with only eight pilots, 15 pilots, and pilots in goal on 10 kilometer tasks. Now that's it. Yeah, yeah, you got... oh, some of the guys were taking two hours to get around 10 kilometers. Oh my gosh, damn. Yeah, sounds like, sounds like
a really bad day in the ex-alps
It was, the thing is, it's—it's the same for everybody. It was massively, highly, massively media-friendly, yeah? And and it ticked all the boxes. And the outside world doesn't know what we do, so we've just got to wind our necks in a little bit and go, "Well, this is actually a thing that could work," but it's going to be a different thing. So within competitions, you know, we've got our traditional—well, I mean, you know, we out here in Australia, we broke the tasking record two years ago. Fantastic. 212 k's to go, marvelous. 45 pilots in goal, great. That was a good day. Um, and then, you know, you compare that with 10 k's around a circuit in Indonesia, where it's actually less than a kilometer between turn points, and you go, "What?" Yeah, but
that one people get to see, the one in Australia. Nobody sees except at launch. That's
Right, exactly. Launch, landing, bit in between—who cares, right? From a public view, yeah.
That's, that's always going to be the the struggle with it. Well, I admire your efforts, and I really admire what you're trying to do with East Asia Games. That's awesome. Um, I think it's going to be a really good year for you. I, I don't even have the vision to imagine it in the Olympics, so if that could, if that could happen, wow, that would be really, truly, uh, fantastic. Um, I'm fascinated by the squad. I'm also really interested because, uh, you know, as you know, as a country, we have really struggled in the Worlds forever since the beginning, and you know, we have amazing talent and, uh, really rowdy conditions and, you know, proper mountain flying, and so, uh, you know, we've definitely, there's always the individuals, but we've never been able to slay it as a team.
So, I, I hope that this, you know, some of the things you're developing there, uh, obviously they're working, and I hope that they're, you know, those listening to this, the show, will be inspired to following your footsteps because, you know, before we started recording, you were talking about just how it's such an individual sport and yet, and people were in the beginning of the squad were a little bit cagey about giving up their, you know, their, their information, and, and you know, one thing I've always really appreciated about Chrigel is that he shares everything, you know, and, uh, it really makes us all better, you know, and, and I, I applaud what, what you guys are doing down there. It's, it's been, it's been awesome to watch, and it must be really thrilling for you to, to see it in the results you were talking about, you know, part of that 15-step plan is assessing how it's working, and you, you must have a nice checkbox next to that one right now.
Oh,
We do, you know, we're running graphs on on each individual Australian pilot of how they actually develop purely in the WRPs, um, and and everyone's going up rapidly, and you look at the curves and it, it doesn't take much statistic analysis to realize it's actually exponential, um, they're zooming and and they ain't gonna peak yet because this coming season in Australia, and I would, I'd like to invite as many international pilots over to Australia as possible, but unfortunately tough, um, their comps have sold out and they've sold out at unprecedented speed, and that's another thing that is the advantage we're gonna have to look at more and longer tier, lower tier competitions to accommodate more competition pilots, so that's another knock-on effect of it, our comps are getting sold out, um, the bright PWC is down to PWC
Uh, any PWC level pilot will know how that works, um, but yes, it really is moving exponentially, um, onwards. So, I, I reckon after this season, we're gonna have five major competitions in the region down here, and uh, we will see Australia top 10 tier, and uh, we'll be ranked where we should be, and then start to become, uh, highly competitive against the rest of Europe, and once we break the Brits, I'll be really happy you
Gotta bring it home, Dave. Awesome. Great talk, uh, so inspiring. I hope that our U.S. listeners, uh, will, will, will jump at this because we're going the opposite way. We have, we had one comp this year, we don't have a nationals, there's nobody. Yeah, it's just, it's been, it's been really sad and it's everybody's hopeful, but someone's got to take the reins and so maybe, maybe we'll, maybe we'll be able to hire you and get you over here and help us out, but yeah.
I, I can do it remotely, mate. You know, I'll sort you out.
Excellent, fantastic, fantastic. Well, we'll bring you on to the next Xops run as well, but Dave, thanks so much. I appreciate it. Great talk. Uh, I can't wait to turn some circles with you in the sky, and uh, looking forward to doing some racing with you guys down in Oz this year. Um, best of luck to you, to the squad, to everybody. Um, thanks so much, appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Gavin. It's been a pleasure. Um, the only way is up, I guess.
Great way to end. Perfect, I
Hope you enjoyed that, uh, really cool sitting down with Dave. Uh, it was kind of hard to coordinate that at different, different ends of the world, but uh, that was pretty interesting learning about how those guys have, uh, just gone from not even sending a team in 2015 to really crushing this year. I hope you got something out of it, hope you enjoyed it. Uh, the next show is with Kevin Brooker on Wave and the Perlan project. Some really cool stuff going down there, and you might have just seen the—the sailplane record just got beaten at 52,000. They think they can get to 100. Uh, mathematically, theoretically, it's possible. It's pretty out there stuff. We'll be talking about that on the next show. See you on that one. Cheers, Brian.
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