Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Cloudbase Mayhem. A couple of things housekeeping before we get into this one. The first is, as some of you know, I tested positive for COVID about a week and a half ago. Don't know how I got it. I've been training pretty hard for the X-Alps and have been spending some time in the gym. So that's one maybe likely spot. But I have been very fastidious about washing my hands and wearing a mask from the beginning, back from March with this whole thing.
Point here is, is just to stay vigilant. I got it a few days before the president did, and we've all seen the fallout from that. I think more than 30 people in that Rose Garden deal that they had tested positive, which in one day was more than Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and South Korea combined. So they say more than 90 % of the U.S. has still not been exposed. And I can tell you this thing is, is, it's no joke. And, you know, you also have to go through the kind of emotional side. It's pretty scary. It's, you feel kind of like an outcast. There's the shame side of it.
And, you know, I'm obviously pretty healthy, training pretty hard for the X-Alps. And, you know, it took my feet out from under me for sure. So be careful. Be fastidious. I think we're in for a long haul here. Doesn't seem like there's any miracles. And certainly be much better to not get it if you can. So be careful, everybody. The second bit of housekeeping is, I know you don't come to this show for politics, but I think it's my show. Say what I want. And we've got a big election coming up. I know many of you listening are not Americans. You won't be voting in this election, but this election is a big one for this country and for the world. And there is certainly.
A lot on the ballot. And I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, but, you know, there's, there's a lot, there's a lot coming down to the wire on this one. And we've just had four pretty chaotic years. And if you're not too excited about the status quo, and you're worried about things like biodiversity and nature and climate change and education and morality, racial justice, income inequality, the American people. And I don't think it's too much to say even our future is on the ballot this year, not just for the president, but for all the down ballot races that are very, very important. So please make a plan to vote.
They say, if you have a plan, you're 20 % more likely to vote. It's less than a month away. Voting is already happening in many parts of the country, early voting. And if you need some help with registration or just make sure you're registered. There's also, you know, there's a lot of voter rolls and suppression and all kinds of stuff going on to keep people from voting. So make sure you're, you're eligible and you're registered. Go to patagonia.com forward slash elections for all kinds of resources on that and make a plan either through absentee or on the day or drop off ballots, mail in, make a plan and make it happen. A lot of people have died. A lot of people have died here and around the world for the right to vote.
It is our civic duty. We got to do it. That's how our representatives listen. And please, this year, please vote. Beg your grandma. Beg the kids that don't think it matters. Get your friends to go. Get a big party to go. Wear your masks and go vote. And I'll leave you with this quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson before you go to the polls. He said, The greatest thing about science is it's true. Believe in it or not. So science is also on the ballot this year. Let's go to the polls and vote. Thank you. This conversation is with Steve Hamm, a British pilot who's been in the game since the very, very beginning and was a real passionate hang glider. Had a bunch of accidents and transitioned into paragliding, has run and been a meat director and been involved in more than 60 competitions, including really big comps like the Worlds and the Europeans.
A bunch of World Cups. He was really the person who put Pedro Gita in Spain on the competition map and has over the years been on the British team a number of times and has held a number of records, both in the UK and in Spain. And just fascinating. Most of you probably know him more recently by his incredible illustrations. He had a pretty bad accident after the 2000, the really famous 2011. Comp and Peter, you know, with all the tragedy, which we go into in depth in this in this conversation, but he had his own personal accident after that, that really screwed up his arm and still has pretty limited mobility and movement in that arm and became an illustrator after that.
That was something he could do with that arm. So, you know him for his amazing illustrations. He illustrated all the Kiwis great articles about his road. To Macedonia and his world's attempt that he did in cross country magazine. And then he illustrated my coronavirus column back in XC Mag this spring, which was really fun. And he did one of the Alaska expedition as well. So he's done a bunch of stuff for me and we've never met. So I really wanted to get him on the show and talk about Peter Gita, what happened there, that the writing was for many people was really on the wall. This was right after. The invention of the two liners. And this was when the R11 came out and Jen had a similar two liner wing and a lot of pilots pretty excited about flying it, but didn't have the skills to do so.
So that world's event day two in Peter Gita went really pear shaped and two fatal accidents and several other reserves and the fallout from that really changed paragliding as we know it. That ended. The open class instigated the CCC class. There was all kinds of interesting things that happened with the serial class after that. And so, yeah, a lot of fallout, a lot of changes. That was Steve's last, the last competition that he ran. He has been a meat director since. But anyway, some great stories. It takes us a while to warm up in this one, but near the end, he talks about a bunch of great stories. So please stick with it.
Thank you. To the end and some great history here and great advice. And I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you do too. Cheers.
Steve, I've been really excited to have you on the show. Ed reached out months and months ago after you did the awesome illustrations for the coronavirus article that I did for the magazine for my column. And I've, you know, I, I, I'm very protective of my Australia PWS. Helmet bag. That's got your awesome illustrations all over it. I've been, I'd love to meet you in person some days. You've been at this for an awfully long time. I actually didn't know how long until you sent me to that great email yesterday with a bunch of your history with hang gliding. You've been at this from the very beginning. And I really want to get into all that, but I thought we might, a very interesting point in your history and in a history in the history of the sport might be to ping off right now.
Peter Hedda in 2011, you were the meat director there at that worlds that was so tragic and really, really changed the dynamic of the, of the sport. And there was a lot of fallout from that. And I just thought to rope people in, you know, obviously the pilots that listen to the show that have been at this game for an awful long time. We remember indelibly the 2011 event, but many of the people that are new to the sport. maybe not so much. So let's start with 2011, your role there. And as we talked about a little bit before we started recording here, many of you thought the writing was on the wall there before that even started.
Yes, we did. Well, we all suspected there might be a possible problem because running out in the spring before the event, the event was in July, which is the peak of the conditions here in Peterhita. And people had been starting flying the new gliders. And the year before, the I-10 had been out and been very successful. But during that spring, some of the newer gliders were coming out. And, of course, the CIVL had changed the ruling on gliders for open class.
And most of the gliders which had been flown the previous season, the three liners, were no longer certified under the new rules. So we had the situation where many pilots, although they were happy on their previous year's three liner comp glider, they couldn't actually fly them because the manufacturer didn't want to spend the money to do the tests once again, because, of course, many of them had new gliders out and they wanted to sell the new gliders. So a lot of pilots would come to the event with new gliders, which hadn't been flown much, although the new rule was they had to have them at least 30 days before the competition happened. But, you know, there was a lot of bad weather and a lot of pilots turned up with very little airtime.
And we also started hearing stories of people saying these gliders are just fantastic. They're just really, you can't deflate them, but when they go, they go. And then the energy was so, so vast and people couldn't deal with what was happening to them. So everyone was just, even with minor deflations, people were throwing their reserves. So we started to get a lot of reserves being thrown in the early part of the season. And, you know, even some big names, Alex Hoffer, who was the European champion back in the early 2000s, where he had an accident, broke his back and other important people, you know, not just, you know, people sort of mid-ranking pilots, but the good pilots. So there was a lot of concern really coming in.
And when all the pilots turned up, you know, I was obviously concerned. I spoke to Russell. He's a good friend for many years. And of course he works with Ozone, very knowledgeable on all these aspects and been involved in testing the pilots. And I did ask him, could you please perhaps do a briefing on the first day with, in front of all the pilots, in the obligatory safety briefing that we were to do, to tell them how to actually fly these gliders. And more importantly, how to recover them. And of course, Russell being what he is, he was very, well, I don't want to teach, it's like teaching a granny to suck eggs, you know, it's not, you know, these are all good pilots. They should know, but you know, I'll, I'll tell them anything. And of course he stood up and went through this, lots of hand gestures, you know, this, that, and the other.
And, you know, I was not looking at him. I was looking at the pilots and a lot of them had, you know, they were a gog really, you know, what, you know, we have to do that. What's, what's a bag flying, what's all this, what's all the other. And, you know, the story was that the gliders only needed a load test and they needed a video of a bag. Of the test pilot recovering from those events. But of course it didn't always have to recover. We just have to have the video of recovering on three or four occasions, apparently. And I asked Russell, you know, what are we going to do? And he said, well, we're hoping for the best, hoping for the best. So we went into this event, hoping for the best for all the pilots. But that's, uh, it was a pretty scary scenario.
Um, the majority of
the We had Steve are the majority of the pilots. Was this the R10?
No, this is the R11, the R10 that had been out the year before. So this is the R11 and, you know, of course, Jin and a number of other manufacturers. They also had their versions of two liners. Um, but you know, the, the, the Kegelizer with the boomerang and the, and the R11. And on the first day we had no incidents. So Keterator is, um, is recognized for its, you know, convergence flying. So you go. Very strong convergence lines over flat lands, and you do huge tasks here quite easily. Um, and the first day was an excellent day. We had a, a repeat of a task we did way back in 1995 at one of the early PWCs we did here. And that was like a world at that time, back in 95 gliders just didn't fly very far, you know, like they were sort of very much sort of fishbowl tasks in the PWC.
Uh, when I announced this task. Uh, of 175 kilometer gold task, you know, people said, yeah, it's impossible. I remember Richard Galland coming up to me and saying, you're crazy, it's impossible. And what for Richard it was, cause he bombed out on the way, but we actually got, I think about 60, 70 of the pilots, a good part of the field to the goal. And, um, well, some other curious things have connected with that, but moving on back to the other, the other, uh, this task, uh, successful tasks, no problems. Everyone got there. Um, there was huge repercussions though. Um, the next morning, because on that, uh, in Peter Ada, we, for the first 65K, you can fly as high as you like. And it was a day with perhaps three and a half thousand, 4,000 meters.
And unfortunately after 65 kilometers, then the airspace limit drops down to 3,000 meters for the majority of the second part of the flight. And although after Russell did his talk, I did a very long explanation of the airspace. You know, with all your visuals, um, a lot of people pass the airspace. And, um, so that was, that was a big discussion on the next morning. In fact, you know, I think of those 60 people who, um, may go, no, I think actually 60 people made it in 1995, but I think it was 120 out of the field of under 50 made the goal. And then I think about 25, 30 of those, we had to count them. And so I think I was, I was rung up at three o'clock in the morning by the Mexican team thing. Get past that.
Get back. Cause of course we deleted the points for the whole of the Mexican team. So they weren't very happy. Uh, but anyway, that was one of the problem going into day two. And then of course on day two, um, we had to rain back. We had another fantastic, really nice forecast with high base, but we don't want to go into that airspace. So we did a relatively short task, uh, just to have it, which is like 65 Ks with a few little bit of flying around the valley beforehand. And on that task, that's when we had the two accidents. Now this is a, it was the day with not strong winds, a day, a little bit similar to the day before, but it was more of a blue day. Uh, perhaps a little bit stronger, a little bit more dry, a little bit more, a little more rough, but the sort of tasks, the sort of conditions that we have here throughout the summer, you know, I'm usually guiding guys on B-class gliders, C-class gliders.
And it's the sort of the milk run we do and flight to Athens, 55, 60 Ks. And, um, it's nice. It's no big deal, but of course, for people flying these gliders, which are a little bit twitchy, a little bit more tricky to control back in those days, then it became very problematic. Of course, we had the two fatal accidents with Italia and Francisco, and also just getting into goal, just trying to lose height over goal. We had three other people throw their shoes, you know, just trying to lose height over goal. Um, you know, people were having, I don't know what extent of deflation they had, but you know, people were throwing their glider, their resorts quickly because they knew they wouldn't be able to. Get out of, um, those, those problems. And then of course, you know, with the two, uh,
fatalities, you know, one of them, uh, from a physical vibrancy was, it was, uh, before the start getting very benign conditions coming back from, uh, the priest start gate turn point. And, um, I think, uh, there was a German pilot who flew through the same air almost just ahead of him, relatively smooth. And unfortunately he, uh, what happened with, uh, from. He had a, uh, an incident and he ended up being in a full store and trying to hold the store, but the last minute, I think from, I think from witnesses, the glider tried to recover from, you know, he must've let up a little bit and it's just swung him into the, or, and he was essentially, you know, killed straight away. We had a pilot landing near him and, uh, he thought he was, um, yeah, he probably died at that moment.
And the other incident, the other case was, uh, with item, um, from. Um, Chile, well, he was actually probably on the final glides goal alongside a friend of his, and I think there were 2,800 meters just on a glide and he took a hit and it, of course, it kind of went into a very, very quick, um, spiral dive. And this later began the reason why we now carry two parachutes in category one competitions, because it appeared that he got one arm trapped. Um, so we couldn't, you know, his throwing hand. So he wasn't able to access the chute. And then, you know, so he, he spiraled down from 2000 down to the ground and, uh, probably killed instantly once again. And of course, with these two fatalities as well, then of course, the whole panorama of category one competitions changed as you probably know, you know, for quite for many years.
And of course, even though it was a world class, even though it was a world championship, uh, we didn't actually have, you know, a lot of media going into the event. But of course, after the accidents, then we had, uh, just about every radio and TV company in Spain hovering around in, uh, trying to report on the event. And of course, of the, the CIVL, uh, after a day or two of deliberation, we decided to, uh, cancel the rest of the competition. We had flown enough tasks for it to be validated. And, and then that was essentially a banning of the open class glider for. Yeah. A number of years until the competition class was sorted out.
What, what became the CCC class took a couple of years, didn't it? It
took, it took some time. After this, you know, this tragic event, of course it hit me emotionally in a terrible way, as it probably did Calvo, who's my safety director. And many people here, you know, that was the end for me, that was the end of running competitions. And it was going to be, uh, uh, my last event, you know, we'd run, you know, perhaps 60, 70 international events since the early nineties. And, um, yeah, it was just, just too much really to comprehend, you know, that it just didn't seem worth going on, you know, doing more events, you know, as time went on, of course, you know, time heals all, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, but I really kind of moved away from, you know, following events and taking too much interest.
Yeah. In what was happening as far as competition, uh, design and development went for the next, for a few years after that. So I don't know too much about all the ins and outs of the subsequent developments of the CC, uh, competition class, but I do know there are a lot of people who really love it. Like it's the, uh, the R11, for example, and, and there are people that we had a Belgian pilot came out quite recently and he's still got his, which he, he, he, he bought another second hand one when that wore out. So many people love those gliders. And of course, in the right hands, they were exceptional gliders, you know, maybe we'll say they were almost possibly more performant than some of the guys we had today. I don't know, cause I don't fly modern competition gliders at the moment.
Uh, but it certainly caused a lot of problems, you know, internationally for the events, um, you know, everyone's had to let them fly serial class. And then of course. Yeah. Serial class, you know, we'd been through this whole serial class many years before in 1998. And then fortunately we, it was very much reliving exactly the same scenario for me. It's 1998, which is my, it was the first kind of one event that we organized here on PWC. We'd had previously some very, very successful PWCs and international, um, national events. And we've done Swedish nationals and Nordics, the British many times, Spanish nationals, of course.
And we did these three PWCs and the pilots, you know, on discovering PDR8 at the merits, especially the European pilots. Um, cause before about 1994, the, the, most of the PWC tasks were in Europe and they were very much sort of fishbowl tasks, 40, 50 Ks, occasionally 60. And then here in 95, we were suddenly doing these huge tasks because, um, we were able to, you know, lines of convergence and even with the gliders at the time. We would, we did 140 K in return, 60 people in goal, this big 175 K goal and lots of other exciting things. And, uh, so we were sort of the flavor, we were the PDR8 was sort of on the map and popular. And we had a lot of people wanting to do the Europeans.
So we did the Europeans and unfortunately it was time also when, you know, there was a lot of developments and things were being pushed. You know, I was listening to Kiwi's, um, podcast the other day and he was talking about, you know, this, this time as well. We're glad it was beginning to get a little bit problematic and difficult to fly. And there were, uh, accidents in many comms. And then it, once again, we, we had, well, once again, we had our first kind of, we won competition and it was just at this cusp of when gliders were becoming very, very problematic. And then we had a fatal accident in our event, sorry, it was actually mid-air, um, soon after launch. Um, so you couldn't really say, well, was it anything to do with the gliders? I don't think so, actually, because actually the accident that day was instigated by, uh,
uh, a pilot flying a, um, what would have been a DHV two, three back in those days, which would have been like a C class glider. Uh, and he had, he fell on top of another glider and they went both went down to the deck. So it wasn't really the, the fact that it was dangerous gliders, but it was on top of all the other, uh, accidents and competencies at that time, which then brought about the. The possibility of the serial class. And there was a lot of argument from, uh, especially Robbie Whittall is very much as the Messiah trying to push this forward. And, um, and in some countries such as great Britain, they went sort of unilaterally and decided we're going to fly serial class only in our nationals. And a number of countries did that, but none of the countries didn't, which then gave some in parity, really, if you're going to the world's events and some people are flying CRO on some people flying open class.
Well, you kind of. You kind of, kind of imagine who's going to win. So the serial class, although it's struggled along for quite a few years and it became this, and it was successful in many ways because it did, um, give, give people that option to take a slightly less, um, risky route. And also if we go back to the nineties and maybe even the early two and the two thousands, um, there was some really nice open class gliders, the real hot ships, the ones that ran really, really well, but you couldn't get your hands on them because they were reserved for. The, the, the factory, the factory pilots. So it's also caused a certain amount of resentment that, um, people couldn't get the good luck, couldn't get these good gliders. Um, but that was another kind of worms back in the nineties, of course, and moving back to 2011,
when we've got the same problem, but this time the CIA goes took, you know, definitive action and said, that's enough and serial class only. But of course, there's. The serial class gliders soon came to resemble very much the, uh, the open class gliders a few years.
Right. Sure. And I, I, I remember the, the fallout from that, uh, you know, with the, a lot of the kind of lighter pilots, I'm thinking about like Tom Payne and Mads Syndergaard, there were, there were a lot of pilots that just, that was kind of it. You know, the Peter heater was, was it when, when they banned the open class, uh, launchers. A lot of the pilots that are lighter, which of course makes me really feel for the, the typically the women pilots who are really light, uh, just, they just didn't feel like they could compete anymore because they didn't have that open class possibility. And it, it was, it was very discouraging. I know for, for many, I think feels, I mean, it feels like that's kind of come around now and it's not so much as, as big of an issue.
I mean, the weight thing has always been issue, but, um. It, I mean, it must've, it must've just been emotionally, not just from the, not just from the tragedy of the two deaths, obviously, but just everything else. It must've just been quite a soup that you were in.
Uh, yes, it certainly was. I mean, we're going back to the, the weight thing on the first day of the, um, the world's here that we only had one Chinese pilot that year and it was a girl. I can't remember her name. I'm not sure. And she was very lightweight, probably about 40, 40, 45 kilos. And most teams would come with the systems, which they had to pay, pay for. And most teams would come with one or two assistants. I believe the Chinese had four assistants and one pilot, but it was this girl. She had, she was carrying a huge amount of ballast. She was flying, she was flying an R11. And, uh, Calver, who is my safety, uh, director, he's very, he's very, the rules are the rules. And he had his, he had a weighing machine to take off.
He did a lot of hammer. You know, very professional sort of weighing machine, and he likes to weigh people. And this, uh, this girl obviously walking out to take off with being carried by four strong, uh, Chinese assistants kind of caught his eye. So, um, for safety, you know, inverted commas, he took her away there and then he said, we can carry all that balance. So he took the balance off her. And of course that made her completely unsafe. So, and she subsequently took off and flew out. Had a deflation. Threw a reserve and, um, we later had to recover her from a tree. So the, some of these rules, which were implicated about, cause it is true, you know, if you are carrying a lot of weight, when you crash, then it can be a problem.
But of course there, you know, with those particular gliders, they needed to be weighted up, obviously to be, uh, to be safe. So there was a lot of anachronisms really on the, on the whole safety thing. And hopefully, you know, things are better now.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, and again, it's this, it's, it's when you look at the range, you know, when you have a, uh, you know, big, heavy, strong guy that's carrying the max, you know, he's up at the 32 versus, you know, like that, the Chinese girl that you're talking about. I mean, it's just, you know, you're for, for one person, that's quite a bit of weight for another person. It's, it's, you're more than double. And it's, it becomes really challenging for takeoff and landing. And obviously. Right. Or for landing, you know, after you've just flown a comp and, uh, you're tired and yeah, it can be real risky. I don't, I can't remember if that was a contributing factor and seco's accident. I think when she broke both of her ankles that might not, I can't remember if that was an acro thing, or if that was just from her being totally loaded up.
I'd have to reach out and find out. But, um, yeah, I mean, I, I know, I mean, just from my own personal experience, you know, like in Alaska we're carrying all that weight is. it's tough when you land or it's tough if you don't have the right kind of wind.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But, um, you know, if you want to fly those gliders and I guess you have to wait up and it's, it's, for me, it was always having to carry the weight up the mountain rather than, uh, you know, you can always dump it before you, just before you land, I guess, can't you? But, um, yeah, I mean, it's one of these eternal questions. I think Brett January, you know, he can, he, he's come up with this new format, uh, for a competition of which I cannot tell you the whole details of the explained that to me quite well earlier this year. And that's, he's been interesting what the weightless competition, that's what he calls it. Um, Yeah. Bruce
Goldsmith too. They're doing some really good stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. So, uh, cause it's always been a bit of a bug there with Bruce as well. Cause, um, yeah, Bruce probably weighs around 65, 70 kilos. And, uh, you know, he's, his observation was, you know, it was all the big butch guys who, uh, winning, especially in the early days. And I think it became less important in the, in the, uh, early nineties that people were sort of flying a huge glider, you know, that 32 square meters carrying vast amount of water, um, just cause it gave them a big edge. And, um, and Bruce is where it was, obviously aware of that and we all are. And, um, so yeah, maybe, um, Brett January's, um, I think he's trying to get some form of approval, approval from the, uh,
CIVL. So, uh, who knows? And maybe that's a good, it's maybe it's a good direction to go.
And was, was your decision to stop running comps literally because of what happened in 2011? Or was it just, it was, it was probably going to be, that was probably going to happen anyway, after running 60 something comps.
Well, I kind of, um, eased off a little bit some years before, uh, the reason we ran the world in 2011 was really, um, to save the site here, because, um, if you're not running, you know, we have the, we have a problem here, which goes back a couple of hundred years, curiously enough. Um, I'll explain why, but basically the, the site of Pieterhieta, although it's directly above Pieterhieta, doesn't actually belong to Pieterhieta because about 200 years ago, the Duke of Alba, who was a local aristocrat, he's got, he was building a palace here and, uh, obviously you couldn't squeeze enough taxes out of the local, um, serfs. And, uh, he went to a nearby village and, you know, to get some money or for building supplies.
And, uh, in return, he said, well, you can have as much of the mountain as you can gather by running, you know, with a flock of, not a flock, uh, with a, uh, a bunch of goats. So Clippity Clock, you know, this, this other guy from the nearby town, took away most of the mountain, including the takeoff. So Pieterhieta now doesn't own the mountain, this nearby small village does. So when we started out all this, uh, these events back in the early nineties, the problem we had, although Pieterhieta was a very, very keen town hall for us to run events, it didn't actually belong to them, the takeoff. Of course we were land in Pieterhieta, um, and all the infrastructure was in Pieterhieta, but this small village of about 14 inhabitants, uh, they were the ones who owned the takeoff and, um, they wanted, uh,
they wanted some benefit from us using their site. So we had, there's all sorts of things going on in, uh, eventually the provincial government stepped in and they built a bar takeoff and they reconditioned the takeoff to a certain amount so that this village could, um, profit from it. However, that wasn't enough for them. I remember on the very first day of the first PWC in 1994 on the practice day, actually, uh, they came up with a takeoff and they bar, they put a bar wire across, right across the middle of the takeoff and, uh, leaving us about, about 10 meters for a takeoff run in front of the bar wire. It was going crazy. And of course we had all these international pilots, and I'm saying, well, these guys are trying to kill us, you know, bar wire all over the takeoff.
And then further, further negotiation and, you know, with the, with the political, with the politicians and it was sorted out to a certain extent, but unless, you know, but by running events each year, then of course the town hall, we're quite happy, you know, seeing the tourism coming in, but then as we eased off a little bit during, after about 2000, oh, we had a big problem. That's right. In 2000, near 2000, they wanted, they wanted to put aerogenerators, wind, electricity windmills across to take off. And, um, uh, obviously we didn't want that. It wasn't going to be very good. The power line, the town didn't want to, this is not very nice for any, any form of tourism, but of course the village, the little village, they were out to make a lot of money from this. So they suddenly became very, very ethical, ecologically aware,
and, uh, wanted their clean energy and the 30,000 euros per year for the, uh, each windmill. And so there was a bit of fight. You know, we had a big struggle and demonstrations, uh, marches, roadblocks, and eventually it kind of won out and we didn't have the, uh, windows installed, but for many years we weren't allowed to fly. You know, we would, although we had, uh, we had supposedly had the legal right of flying at the takeoff, the owners could go to the police station and say, look, they're on our land. So they'd buy it. I wired it up. So we were actually going in, taking off over this new, new barbed wire they'd been put up. And for many years, the whole thing went into a bit of a collapse period and to get the things going back again, to get the town hall and provincial government on our side,
well, what's better than the world championships.
So in we went to, uh, and we bid for the world championships. Uh, we got it. And of course that allowed, you know, huge infrastructure. We now got 3,000 square meters of, uh, AstroTurf, the bar was rebuilt. And so the positive aspects of the world championship was the fact that we've now got a fantastic takeoff and a great infrastructure. Um, my last, the last world championships I did with the British team was in, uh, Manila in, um, in Australia in
2007. Uh,
Bruce won though. And yes he did. And, um, and, uh, I thought, well, I did quite well there because, uh, I won a couple of events before in Manila, Godfrey Wednesday's opening events and the New Zealand nationals I won there as well. And so I thought, well, if I'm ever going to do anything good, it's going to be here in Manila, you know, this world's cause, um, I'd been to other worlds and I didn't do particularly well to be honest. And, um, it was going okay. No, unfortunately. Well, was it going okay? Not really. Cause we had pretty poor weather, you know, as often happens, you know, Manila, Manila is a fantastic venue. And then along came the world championships and, you know, poor Godfrey, poor us, you know, we all had this really suboptimal bad weather and lots of clouds storms the week before we had the experience with the Ava Vishneska.
If you remember, the girl went up into the, uh, into the CUNY into 10,000 meters. Cause I was there, I was actually just underneath there. And, um, I mean, that was, you know, that was just crazy, crazy day. I, you know, it was an open, it was an open distance, uh, uh, competition, which Godfrey was running running the week before. And, um, I took off and I was top of the stack first to leave. And I went off because it was a big congestus cloud forming downwind. I thought, Oh, no, thanks. Or go crosswind. And it was open distance. You'd go any direction you wanted to, but I thought, well, no one's going to get towards that big congestus guys. Cause that'd be crazy. So they're going to follow me. And I can't look back and everybody went the other way directly to this thing, this big cloud. But, um, and I kept on off on my, on my other route, but of course it was a bad route.
I ended up getting low. And by the time I got back up again, I drifted on downwind and I was kind of going in the same direction as everyone else. Meanwhile, there's another big congestus cloud about 20 kilometers further to the right of track. And, um, I was kind of speeding up and noticing it was all getting a little bit lifty. And then these two cumulus, very large cumulus, towering cumulus were beginning to coalesce and there's still gaps. And I was just flying straight through. Lots of people were still climbing. And I, yeah, I kind of got to the edge just before the sort of clunk, you know, the door shut behind me. And it was just solid cloud and I'm not particularly brave person anymore. And I just kept on pushing, pushing, pushing, got beyond that. And looking back, you know, you can see the shelf of the cuneum. And there were people, they were just climbing underneath it. And there's only about three people ahead of me.
I think, you know, everyone's trying to get higher. I didn't worry about the height. I think David was ahead and, um, uh, two or three others. But as I was pushing into the blue, I still got lower. I could feel the, the wind was changing as all being hoovered back into the cuneum. So I didn't take any clients. It would have just drifted back into the cloud. I landed very quickly, but by the time I was packed up, it was pissing down with rain and it had gone crazy. And of course there's lots of stories that day. And I went to find some, some shelter. And then when the rain, you start for carpool, it was just German team leader, Stefan must. And the last coordinator you had was above that shack and it pretty much where I was watching those people rather foolishly take, take time into the cuneum.
And, uh, well, yeah, so there I was that day. And then the week after minute, so going back to my last competition, I thought I might do quite well, but unfortunately it was pretty shit weather. And which wouldn't have been so bad because I'm British kind of used to bad weather and mincing around. Um, but I was flying a Bruce's new, um, fr four, I think it was called. And this is a, this is a real banana. There was a one in eight aspect ratio glider. Yeah. It was a three, three liner and it didn't have any possibility of big earring or I think you could be lined, but Bruce said, maybe not. Is it a little bit exciting? And, um, and then with the competition with so many clouds around, you know, you kind of couldn't control your height very well.
So again, you'd have to sort of take big routes around clouds or fly extraordinarily fast. And hopefully you'll descend before you go into cloud. So I had some good days, bad days. And as a whole, the British team were doing okay. In fact, on the three days for the end of the event, we were actually, we were on the podium as a team. We would have been on the podium and Bruce was winning. And then, um, we thought, well, okay, you know, I was sort of fighting. Well, it's pretty bad. It's 20 and something not so bad, not so awful. And, um, I might not be allowed to do it actually. I might have a worse than that, but I wasn't, I wasn't too embarrassingly bad. And we were going to be on the page. It was a British team. Oh, Hey, yo. And it was bad weather. And it was, and it was looking like it'd be bad weather.
And we thought, great, may it rain for the, you know, for the last day, because, um, and Bruce will win and we're winning. And, you know, I think it's the worst possible thing you can do in the competition to hope for bad weather, of course. So then the next day, of course, the weather, it gets good and you're all demotivated because you think, because you don't want to fly. And then we had to fly in both. I think it was myself, Mark and Russell. We all just had a bummer, but Bruce, superstar. I managed to get into goal, took the world's and, uh, the rest of us had a good old cry because we were no longer on the podium, but, uh, and then we had really, really shitty results. So I thought, well, bloody hell, I am really shit. So I better stop doing this or I didn't actually, I went to, I think I did the pre, I did the pre was in, in, in 2009.
Um, but it was all sort of on the downhill slope. I mean, then already, and, um, and then of course it got focused on trying to get this world thing together. And I thought, well, that's going to be my Swan song as far as, you know, I want to be out with a fantastic, exceptional event. You know, it was going to be flabbergasted every day, you know, big epic tasks and everything you want to composition. And I was going to be, you know, law, there's a superstar and a master meter. And of course it didn't turn out to be anything like that at all. It turned out to be a tragic nightmare. And, uh, and it turned out. It turned out to be what it was, which we, we've already discussed.
I was in a pretty bad way that year. And then, uh, and then I had a really bad accident myself, personal accident, you know, just nothing spectacular, you know, all the really bad accidents, you know, just stupid things that I managed to mash myself up really badly, shattered my right arm. And, uh, you know, that left me in pain for five, five years, you know, pretty bad pain and I lost, lost the use of my arm pretty much, you know, it's still locked. And, uh, I haven't got much, very much movement on it, but for some, for many years I was able, I was able to fly, but I went back to flying B class gliders. And, um, yeah, I couldn't con couldn't really consider flying a competition then on. And then I kind of fell out of the habit and I actually began to, um, realize how much, uh, how liberating not flying competitions is, uh, because of course, when you fly a competition, you're
pretty angry most of the time. Cause no, cause yeah. Unless you win. Um, it's a pretty, uh, annoying experience sometimes because, uh, there's a lot of pressure and you, and, uh, if you don't do well, you can, you get pretty pissed off. And, uh, and I, as a meter actually running competitions, also, you've got, you know, 150 people who are on that pretty pissed off a lot of the time as well. Cause you know, there's only one guy wins at the end of the end of the competition. So it was, um, in a way liberating for a few years, but then, you know, of course the town hall here. Hey, Hey, what's going on? We need, you know, we need competitions. And luckily, uh, other people kind of stepped up. I should, uh, a lot of you, uh, the chapel was the, uh, the other organizer of the world.
He wants to carry on running Spanish events and things. So, um, although I wasn't me direct, I, I started doing the meteor briefing and then I got roped into doing, uh, helping on the task and became pretty much. The meat director. For a number of, um, events here, but I was all a little bit, um, reluctant, shall we say? And, um, but then a few years ago, I was run up by some nice people in, uh, Columbia and asked me to help out with an event in Rolani. Yeah. So I went there and that was, that was a different experience. There was, um, it was more of a fun event and most of the people were happy most of the time, which is refreshing. And, um,
such a consistent. Place. Isn't it? I mean, you get to, I think people are happy when they get to fly every day. And that's the nice thing about Rolani is you just get pretty consistent weather.
Yeah. And also, I think a lot of people go there, not really for the event, you know, these, these were, um, open events, sort of funny events. And, um, of course there was this, there was the serious guys, you know, um, and a lot of, a lot of Americans and on the whole, people were really nice. And they were really good about it. And I thought, yeah, actually I do kind of miss this and, um, I'll do this game if they ask me. Again, and they did, um, this year and I think one other time. So who knows, you know, who knows. That
one of the problems we have with comps in the States is no one can figure out how to cover their costs, you know? So they, they have to charge a lot of money to do it. And then, so then that often affects people signing up because they're pretty expensive and, you know, we just, we don't have the, the sponsors that help cover the retrieve costs or the gas costs or. The vehicle costs or the personnel costs, that kind of thing. I mean, it's just, we, we've never really figured it out. Like, you know, Miguel and his whole A The Los Del Hombre team has done in Valle or it sounds like you've done in Peterhida.
Is that, um, No, no, no,
no,
no, no. We haven't done this. That's been the, uh,
we've never ever had a sponsor beyond, well, actually we, we've had to rely on the town hall and the provincial government throwing some money. And I did actually have, um, you know, you've heard of Red Bull, I guess, obviously the Red Bull, they sponsored us in the, uh, it was a PWC or the Europeans back in the mid nineties. Do you know what, do you know what they sponsored us with? Well, they turned up with a couple of cars and some girls and bikinis hanging out Red Bull and they lent us a tent. And I think, I think we've got two crates of, we've got two crates of Red Bull out of it. And I had to pay, I had to drive the, I had to drive the tent back to Madrid. And it was. It was, uh, thank
you very little Red Bull
wasn't big bucks, you know? And then, you know, for example, one of the reasons I stopped doing the PWC, we had some very successful PwCs here and, uh, in nine, but after 1990, I've already mentioned the death of the, in the Europeans. Now the Europeans is very, you know, a category one competition is a very expensive event to run. And, you know, we ran it once again with money from the provincial government. Um, but yeah. Um, we knew how much it's going to cost, you know, when the PWC costs a lot of money as well to run, if you do it correctly with all the bells and whistles, all the hospitality stuff that you have to do. But after 98 and that event would be with the, another tragic death, I wasn't so keen, but the tunnel were pressuring me to run in a PWC event.
So, um, I was in the PWC committee at this time. I think I was, I started with the PWC committee in about 95 because they wanted someone to give a bit of input because most of the committee. See, there's people like Harry buns, Hans Bollinger, and, um, it was mainly, uh, pilots who were, and they were looking, you know, what pilots one, which is great. But of course, sometimes you need to actually, the guys were putting a neck out to run the events with the organizers. They, they felt that they, they need to get some input from there. So I was on the PWC and I requested running another event, Peter, although I didn't really want to. So we got a PWC for 1999 and the Pantano said, yeah, yeah, we'll back you up, you know? And I said, this is a cost. It's a lot of money. You know, we've got to pay the quota PWC. She, no worries. You know, we've got loads of people.
We're going to ask for sponsorship. Great. Cause you know, I'm completely rubbish, any form of trying to get sponsorship, but you go ahead and knock yourself out. Great. Fantastic. And, um, so we went ahead with, you know, we went ahead with getting everything going, you know, the entropy started coming in. Um, and I think it's about a month before I went to the town hall and unfortunately they'd had a election in the meantime. And some of the, the counselors have changed and I said, Hey, uh, how are you getting on with all these sponsors? And he said, oh, well, um, I think we're going to cancel. I think we're going to cancel because, um, we can't, yeah, we haven't found anyone. And what kind of a month or so away the money was in people had the flights booked and we had to go ahead.
And then we had to, so we had the, we had the entropy money. So, um, I spoke to, um, is that really Maria? And who was going to be. My TV for that event and Fred, the screamer and Mandy, who are going to be the scorers. So that in those days, that was just a very small now things have changed in the PPC. Now they have their whole team and the organizers is a very little part of putting up the shell infrastructure. Um, but in those days it was slightly different, but you know, I would normally have to pay for their flights across. I said, Hey, is that jumping your car? All come in one car. You're going to stay at my house and then we're going to cut costs. And of course we had to cut costs and you might think, well, wouldn't it be great if it rained for half the week and we could, we could lose some trucks. Some of course it turned out to be, you know, every single day was flyable and good.
So all the expenses were there, but we ran the event and it was a lot of hassle. And I, we kind of broke even didn't lose money, but there was a lot of hassle and a lot of stress for not making any money with, with, with the potential to have lost a lot of money. So that was the end of it for me, for running further. Pete, that was in P in P. You see, without, you know, actually, and I actually had the written thing stamped, signed, sealed in the town hall at that time. So when we went to the world, I made sure that the mayor of Peter came with me to Austria with some of the counselors and we did the presentation together. And it was all seen as them being the organizers, although really it's a local club, you know, they were the front.
So they were going to get all the kudos and they were going to pay, pick up all the bills, of course, as well. And that way, you know, I had them sort of trapped on that second time for the awards in 2011. But there is, we've never had a, apart from those two cans of, two crates, sorry, of Red Bull. I shouldn't shortchange them. It was two crates, not two cans. And very, you know, sexy girls with bikinis on the day, you know, that was the sum total of our sponsorship, I guess, we were probably given.
It's a tough sport. And I think Miguel could teach us. Oh, a lot about that side of it. He's, he's obviously got it pretty figured out down in Mexico, although with COVID it's, it's proving challenging for, for everybody, obviously. But, okay, well, two things you said that I need to bring you back to, and you also, you wrote this in your email to me as well. You had this accident that, that did your arm in. Did that, did that lead to the illustrations or were you an illustrator already?
No, I wasn't an illustrator already. I had a great interest in. illustration and art, but, you know, as a child, younger person, but I got, since I was, you know, 18, a kid, I was just so motivated by flying and stuff. And that just kind of got in the way of everything else, really. And then suddenly, you know, I lost the interest in the competitions and, and I had this sort of arm, my right arm, and I am right handed. And it was just like it belonged to somebody else. You know, I've got very little movement in it. And I thought, I'm going to do some rehabilitation. I start trying to draw. It was quite painful. And it was through that really sort of early. And then it started to get better.
And I found by having, having a board at the right angle, I could use, I could slide my arm across and draw by sliding the pen across the, you know, it's not going digital, which is much, which is even slightly out of the screen. And you know, I can, I started. Messing around with that. I started doing it at the age of 18. But I finally got a little bit, you know, the, the, the the the idea of, you know, trying to make it a more solid way of doing things. And I think I put some of these out when I was in my early, early 90s. And I think I put something up about the evolution of paragliding hang gliding. Yeah. And it, from Cross Country Magazine, saw it. And at that time, he was looking to inject a bit. illustration cartoons in a magazine and he said can I try to do some illustration and they had this idea of doing a piece about the huge range of personalities within the sport but within
That range of the people within the sport, there are many stereotypes, and so they were little stories he'd write each month, and I was illustrating those stories for—I think we probably did a couple of years of those—to us around this team, they
were great you illustrated for Kiwis Gun for the Worlds, those were really terrific
I really enjoyed that stuff with Kiwi; it was a struggle at the beginning with him.
He's a forceful sort of personality, and he was really fired up on the whole
competition thing, and I had met him back in the 90s, and I'd been seeing him over the years, and he's a very gregarious, extroverted guy.
but I'd never really seen him do much flying. He'd always be turning up at the Worlds in Portugal, and he was covering that event. And of course, he did that. He talked about his first piece for XV Magazine and the article he did for the Worlds in Granada back in, I think, the year 2000. I was at that event, and it was—I thought that was one of the best things I'd ever read as far as that was the best ever review of a paragliding event, which was fantastic. And of course, I met him later at other events, but he was never really flying. He was often involved in his writing and stuff. When I met him, he was reporting as opposed to flying in the event. And then now, here he is, 50, 53 and he was flying in the event and he's starting his competition thing and of course he sent me the he sent me the the
story, and of course I'm searching for to find some angle, you know, a bit of humour, because I'm not just gonna—I'm not doing sort of direct reporting, I'm taking
any little remark he might make and going off in a complete, a complete tangent with my, with my, my own little story. I'm not just gonna be, and of course, I picked up on that, on the whole psychedelic thing. And you know, we had quite a tight deadline and I was working, you know, I probably did, probably like 200 hours or something, a huge amount of time in the space of these two weeks to get these out. And then he rang me up. He was really, "Hi Chris, this is great. Steve, you know, we're gonna be like Hunter Thompson and you're gonna be my, you know, my illustrator." And he was really fired up and I said, "Yeah, great. You know, I've done this stuff. You know, I'll stick my cross on the... I'll send them to you now." So I got home because I was out walking the dogs when he called me and I sent them to him by email.
And then I thought, "He's got a lot of these and nothing came back, you know?" And it was quiet, you know, radio silence. And then I thought, "Oh, hey, maybe he didn't like them." And then Ed rang me, or Ed—I got an email from Ed. I'm in the pub with Kiwi. He's mad, he's really, really, he really pissed off. And of course, he didn't want the whole psychedelic thing to be brought in. And of course, in that first edition, there was, you know, there's tryptamine frogs on his head, and you know, it's just magic mushrooms here and there. It was just
And he wanted to be seen as a very serious person because he was gonna be... well, he wanted to be selected for the paragliding team. He didn't want to be, I don't know, I presume... I presume that everybody knew about his, you know, psychedelic, you know, writing, but he was trying to keep that very secretive and it seemed... and anyway, luckily Ed sort of talked him down and he ended up, you know, really actually enjoying it and he put it on. He kind of really got to like his little alter cartoon, oh.
That really surprises me, knowing knowing Kiwi like I do. That surprised me, I guess. What it all comes down to isn't isn't it? Is, you know, we all have egos, and we especially as pilots, we're all pretty cowboy and independent and think we're the smartest thing ever, you know? And then our idea is gonna work. And so, I guess I guess he, you know, still firmly falls in that, you know, he has an ego, I guess, and like we all do. So that's interesting. I would have thought he would have kind of celebrated. I tried to get him going on that route a couple times in the podcast, and he just—there was no, it just refused. Yeah, well, I
guess you know
I guess he wants it's interesting because it's such a big part of his life. I mean, a bigger part, really.
Yeah, you know, and I think in the end he really appreciated that, and he really enjoyed it. And then at the end, he was, he was trying to feed me with ideas for cartoons, and you know, he had this whole, this whole Ralph Steadman leaving Las Vegas style image, which we were gonna do for the last one, which never, you know, there were, there were some fallouts with that particular series. Um, he had some fallouts with some people in the, in the, in the federation. Some people didn't like some of the artwork, which I did, um, which I tried to explain actually was linked to my, you know, I did. There was one particular picture and, uh, because Keywood was, uh,
Annoyed at one particular event because he was pushed off the podium, yeah, by the meat director who was flying the event and, um, you know, I'm pretty, um, against me the rotors flying. Um, I can't really see how you can do both those things. In fact, I did actually do that myself once and I, I, well, here's another, another of my excellent stories. I, we back in, um, 19, 1994, on my first PWC, you know, I was a pilot, love flying, wanted to fly, but I was also a meat director, so I wasn't gonna fly as a pilot and score, but I wanted to kind of be involved, you know? And I had a TD, which was Xavier Raymond at the time, and, uh, we had this, uh, task and it was a similar route to the previous year.
I did, uh, this big flight and, um, in '93, and I got what was then the European record, which was, uh, quite big in those days. Uh, I mean, those days, it was easy to get records in Europe because, you know, Anything over 100 was like big stuff, and I did about 160k, and I ran along the age of tuning, uh, convergence line, which, um, was jolly frightening, jolly stupid, but I survived it and, like, did a big flight. And the year after it would be, I would say, we had kind of similar conditions, and we had to cancel the task, but as I was trying to get down, my glider went to pieces on me, and, um, I ended up with the things spinning. I had a big, the whole thing was all twisted up, and I was like, spiraled, spiraling down, no control, all twisted up, so I had to throw my reserve, and I threw my reserve,
and, um, luckily it opened, and then I started going up at the reserve because, of course, there was a QNM, but and, uh, then the glider sort of, um started flashing over the glider, kind of started flying because it was heavily cravatted, but that sort of unfolded itself and then I downplayed, which was very, very convenient. And, uh, as I downplayed, I was actually very close to goal at this time, and the meet being the meet there, actually, I thought, well, I better say something because they were down in goal watching me. And although it had been absolutely terrifying, I thought, well, the parachute's out, wouldn't and I'm not actually descending, and I might actually survive this, so I better come across as a bit of a hero. You know, I thought, so I was thinking, what would, what would, uh, what would a Spitfire pilot say as he was just about to bail out?
You know, so I had a, I really, I thought, right, this I was going to say, this, right, this is a spot of trouble, but it seems to be okay now coming down. Okay, that's what I was going to say, but um I kind of got hold of my radio, okay? By now, I had the glider sort of gathered it up, and I was coming down on the reserve. You know, there were lightning bolts and things belting off to the to the east of us, but to the left, it was sunny. But when I was going down, which was convenient, and uh, I was about to say these immortal words, and I realized my tongue was so dry and so expanded I was, and and then I hit the glass from because I got to lower, and then I went, "Oh, help!" So I didn't come across as very, very brave or very noble at all, and I kind of hit the ground going extraordinarily fast, bounced a few times, and I luckily, I ran this sort of Castilian flatland, and I was dragged across this field at a rate of knots.
And then, luckily, there was a field next field coming out, didn't have a fence, but it was a sunflower. plant field tall sunflower, so that sort of broke the the speed of my my travel, and then shortly after, actually, the jockey Sanzen sort of turned up because he was in goal, and he jumped in the car and rushed in came, and he was the first on the scene, and I, yes, well, that was, that was a, do you think I was a meat director and I was in the sky and I made a, yeah, that was very embarrassing. For instance, you can't do, you, you can't do both jobs very effectively, and anyway, going back to Kiwi, and also, so we're talking, I was trying to think of a
pilot's reaction to meat directors, so we're talking about Kiwi was a little bit disgruntled with this particular meat director, and I was trying to think of, well, how can I pick, how can I portray What pilots think of a meat director, and I cast my mind back to that event in 2011, not the day of the accident, the day before when all those pilots had a fantastic day, got to goal at 175k, and then the meat director told them, "Sorry, but you're, you've got a zero for the day." And they didn't like me very much at all, really. At the briefing the next day, you know, there was the odd word of, you know, "fascist bastard," and that sort of, you know, comment. And so when I came to draw, you know,
what's often an embodiment of a meat director, I did a picture of a sort of jackbooted fascist type, which had no resemblance. It wasn't a character of anyone in particular; it was just a character of a fascist dictator from the 1930s dressed up in a sort of meat directing kit with a with a yellow map behind him, and I think in the background there was a shadow of two people he'd hung for airspace infringements. But anyway, that didn't go over very well with a particular meat director in New Zealand who had pushed Kiwi off the off the podium, and because of that, perhaps because of that drawing and perhaps of Kiwi's belligerence at times, then a little thing kicked off with the federation, and then you know, Kiwi came, he got got a little bit riled about, a bit riled about that really,
and because of that, the magazine had to make an apology. and I think that kind of pretty much put a downer on the on the series
Yeah, yeah, so I think
Although Kiwi did, yeah, he did actually. He wrote the last ones, and of course, the whole series was called The Road to Macedonia, but by this time, the world of Macedonia had already gone, and Kiwi had spent some, quite some time. He was a bit late on getting the the work out because he broke his arm in the meantime, or his wrist, so he couldn't ride. So things got a little bit, a little bit heated, and there was—it ended a little bit sadly, really, but I really enjoyed the whole thing, and it was, it was great to be with him there. And of course, you know, it's devastating to hear about his, his early demise there, yeah.
the weekend before we were flying in Nevada together, and he—I'm very intimate with that whole story you just said, and
I just
recollected, because I of course heard it. I heard an earful about it from him on his side, that was kind of ongoing for a while, but he was—it was really interesting because I'm thinking this last year, I'm pretty sure he did 11 or 12 comps. I mean, he just went from comp to comp to comp, and it was—it really kind of over. I mean, he was actually losing interest a little bit in Burning Man. He's gotten kind of corporate and big money, and in that thing that had kind of been a big chunk of his life for over 20 years, and so he was—he was really putting a lot of effort and time into comps, and I—he made a crack when we were in Nevada that he—he kind of—he came up and joined us mostly just out of boredom, and that, you know, he wasn't—there were no comps, and he was like, "God, it's just, you know, I—I don't have, you know, none of the psychedelic scene is happening right now because you can't, you know, be together in large groups, so none of that stuff's happening, and none of the comps are happening.
I just, you know, I don't—I don't know what to do with myself." And he was, he was laughing at himself because he said, "I just, I'm surprised that the comp scene has become such a big part of my, you know, free time and entertainment." And, and what I'm pursuing is that my, I'm, I'm going to orient this towards a question. Has, was for you being a part of the comp scene, you know, all those decades? I mean, this, it really was almost from the beginning in your hang gliding days and on through. You know, looking back, would you have done, would you have put more emphasis on something else? What was, are you, are you, would you have changed anything looking back?
If I, I was changed, not crashing on numerous occasions, that's for sure. But you don't often get advanced or any of that. But yeah, I used to make a—I mean, I had a real habit of crashing hang gliders, but you seem to be able to crash those and the wreckage tends to save you on the whole, although not all of the case. But I don't know why, I'm not sure what I would have changed you.
know I've never been particularly, well, I wasn't really able to follow the whole competition thing to my design. I would, I would have flown a lot more events than I did, but you know, the financial constraints were just too much. You know, I was able to go to many events by being a team in the 90s. Most of the events I went to, I was going and working as a, as a technical delegate for the PWC, which is a role which then took on and really made his own during the 2000s, but I, of course, I have to work here in the summer, so the summer season was pretty much close to me. So most of the comps I was doing were in Australia, and I would have liked to have done more, but it wasn't really a route for me, a route for me to do so
It's the flying guy, I think I do. You know, of course, from here, from June to August is when our work season, and then the rest of the year was... it's no good at all here for, for cross country. So, you know, during the summer I couldn't really compete. So I don't know, you know, it's who knows how we would change. Perhaps I should have got a proper job when I was younger and done that. But this, I do admire people who can, can do, can have a proper career and also do their paragliding, and then be able to put their flying aside and have a normal sort of family work life. And I was just never able to do that, you know? I was so obsessed from an early age that, yeah...
just went along this whole poverty stricken, you know, putter in the flying thing, so yeah, so there you go.
In your, on your website, it said hang gliding ruined any serious career path, and you—you studied zoology and physiology, and then you got into hang gliding. Sounds like pretty soon, or at the kind of the same time you're coming out of school, and and you obviously chose the the career path of of piloting. You know, that was a while back, Steve. You and I are in the same department here when it comes to getting a little older on the tooth, but it's any regrets?
No, I mean, I hang gliding was just so important to me, you know? I had a, you know, when I started, I had a sort of one of the pilots in our local club called Mark Haycraft, who was always my guru, who's I think he's won the French excelling many times over the last few years, where you know, he used to say, I remember us thinking, if even if someone said, you know, this is going to kill you within the next five years, it would have been difficult to stop, you know? It was just such, such an obsession, such a buzz. And of course, I did give up, you know, I did give up hang gliding because I didn't fly hang gliders anymore, which is kind of curious, but of course, then paragliding took over. But yeah, it was just such, it's just such a demand on, you know, on, you know
Many people suffer this, you know? You can't be happy. It is a drug, you know? It's like crack, cocaine, or any of those other things, you know? It creates a dependency. I think I'm over the worst of it now. I'm sort of in rehabilitation. I can actually, you know, chill out on a—on a good flying day and not worry too much about what I'm missing. Um, but yeah, in New York, when I was younger, then it was—it was hard, you know, to go—go to a normal job and think, "Christ, it looks like a good day out there. I should fly," and I'm inside here, you know, trying to earn some money. So when I finally got the opportunity to, you know, I was picked up by Airwave in about '91 to come out to Spain to set up their—their dealer network, and so for me that was a blessing, you know?
I could finally, you know, do some work with, um, what I really love. And of course, it didn't work out at all because it was, um, yeah, it was a disaster. You know, Airwave importation for me in Spain didn't work out, but then I soon moved into, you know, I recognised, I discovered Peter Heath, if you like, and, um, saw the merits before anybody else did because there was no—I'm really flying here—there's no effective takeoff apart from just taking off from the, the actual side of the road and, by you know, developing the competitions and doing the flyers and the fly guiding, then it all started to work and it was an income and it worked and it's got better and it's, it's been fine. So I've enjoyed that and I'm still flying after all these years and now I don't do the, I don't do the competitions.
and that was a big bus, but it was also a big disappointment, as I said before, but flying with, you know, groups of what is, you know, the people who come out to visit me, they come out, they're often the same people every year, so it's like flying every day with your mates going out to sea, so, um, it's great, what could be better, you know, that's it, could have been better this year, but
Well, you know, it's hopefully next year we'll be back to normal. But yeah, I think, I think the whole, the whole industry is obviously suffering, and so it has been a lovely year. We were able to scrape through and get on the month, most of the month of July and August, we were able to fly without restriction, and you know, we had a reasonable number of pilots coming out here, so not, not so bad. And of course, now things are getting worse again, but it doesn't matter because it's bad weather for us. I shouldn't say it doesn't matter for the world, it matters, but for Steve Hamm and our flight operator, it's, uh, no longer important for the next few months and
Is the is the chunk of the work there in Peter Heater for you tandems, or instruction, or both?
No, no, it's all, it's, uh, I do do tandems, yeah, but that's very minor part, um, I'm, we're mainly working with, um, sort of intermediate, advanced pilots, you know, usually sort of B class, C class guys, people are flying XC already, and they just come here for a holiday, and they want to go XC, so I'm solving that problem for them, all the infrastructure, um, accommodation, flying with them, and I kind of treat each day as I would, perhaps, if it were a competition, you know, we do a very detailed meteo brief and talk through the potential flight we're going to do, iron out all the possible problems, so then we're actually flying, we don't have to be, you know, I'm not radio controlling people at any stage, you know, we're just making strategic
decisions or comments about the weather around us and what's happening and how we might adapt, but you know, none of this "no turn left, turn right," you know, it's um, it's like flying with your mates and that usual interaction which you have can
You, um, elaborate on, maybe, you know, one or the two, because you talked about the accident with your arm. I, I, not to delve into the darker side too much in this talk, but I think we can often learn from, from accidents. Uh, sounds like you've had a few. What are, you know, what, what, what was the cause? What were the takeaways? How could you, how could you help people not have the same thing happen to them?
Ooh, well, I mean, as I said, with hang, you know, it's sort of, um, I was going through aluminium like it was going out of fashion in the early days because, um, I was just young, keen, and nothing, you know, the consequences weren't that bad on the whole when I crashed things and, um, so I had a very, and I think when you're, when you haven't, when you're younger, you haven't got this preoccupation with, "Crikey, this might kill me," you know, you kind of, you're able to learn more effectively. So your learning curve when you're reasonably brave and not so worried about the, the consequences are very good. So I, I think I got hang gliding, I got pretty good pretty quick with hang gliding because I was a bit blasé to the, to the, to the, to the problems.
Yeah, I landed up, yeah, I had a, I actually had a some very near misses, you know, I was, I guess you've heard of Bill Moyes, the Australian famous Guy, well, he was very kind. We went out for my first big hang gliding comp. We went out to go to the Forbes event, which was a tummy event, and we went out to see Bill, you know, this internet, this like god of hang gliding, and he's, uh, he kind of likes poms, and he kind of took us under his wing, and he took us up to his holiday home in somewhere north of Sydney, in Newcastle, and we went towing with him. Now, his towing was quite a precarious thing in my opinion. Well, it was very exciting. Basically, he'd tie a long line, a washing line, to a speedboat, and then you'd coil up all this,
this line, this rope on the, on the edge of the beach. You'd clip onto the hang glider, and he had some sort of, it's like a motorcycle throttle cable, going up to a clip on the nose, and then you sort of lift your leg, he'd go herring off on the speedboat, and then When the line goes, there's no more lightning, bing, you're off, and you sort of climb out, and you'd be flying out to sea. And of course, there's no radio, and um, I think when you get high, that's when you open. You sort of wiggle your legs around, and that means building that release. And we had this circumstance where we were very high, going out to sea. It was fantastic, you know? Dolphins in the bay, it was beautiful. And I got that bit of noise down there telling me it was amazing, and I pulled the clip to get rid of the line, and it just jammed.
And the line was attached to the hang glider, and I had a kilometre or so of line out, going out to sea. No radio, no idea what to do, and um, I sort of wiggled my legs a lot, and I think Bill kind of realised what happened. And of course, what are we going to do, you know? Because of course, I can't attach the line. It's obvious to get lower, the line would go into the water, and I'd just dive it into the water. And luckily, there was like a sandbank further out, and he kind of throttled back, and he just lowered with a tall line. I landed with the line on on this sandbank, and that wasn't an accident that could have been a fatality, and there's a friend of mine
Chris Jones in the boat, and Bill being an Aussie bloke, he wouldn't let Chris fly because Chris was a vegetarian and he had long hair. So Bill, being an Aussie bloke, said, "No, you can't fly, mate, you know Pommy Puff." But Chris said that Bill did get a little bit—he got a little bit concerned that, you know, he might be kidding me that day. But the next day, you know, Bill, there's another. I did have an accident, but a minor one. We're on the beach and Bill goes herring off on the speedboat and the line's whipping away and there's a bit of a long short drift, so he's taking the line off one way and then there's the winds coming off to the right and the speedboat is going straight on and I'm thinking, well, which way do I point the hang glider in? Do I point it at the line? Do I point it at the wind? Do I point it at the boat?
and I'm thinking this really quick, because the line's still whipping away, and I took a vector of the three, you know, and then my maths was off anyway. Well, Bill mentioned to Chris in the boat, he said, "Well, you watch what happens now, knowing that I'm about to take a cropper, I'm going to have an accident." And he, and of course I was facing my way, and I both my brakes broke and I was dragged across the beach because of the inertia of the boat putting the line and totally the glider for the day. But Bill just wanted to show me that, you know, he likes, you know, the school of hard knocks, I guess. And he came about and said, "Now, what did you do wrong?" And I said, "Well, I don't know, what did I do wrong?" He said, "You've got to point at the line." So that's what you need to do, point at the line.
So I learned that, and I'll never forget that, but I've never been on another speedboat. ride, so that was... that was mildly uncomfortable around my nether parts that day. And then I did have a proper good real hang gliding accident, because I was still thinking, "I'm good at crashing, I'll carry on crashing." And then at the Spanish Nationals back in 1991, when I just started bringing the railway, we were at the second phase of the Nationals in Castellón de Sos, which is a big sort of like an alpine environment in the north of Spain in the Pyrenees, and it's a great place, fantastic place for paragliding. It's not so good for hang gliding because there's nowhere to land, it's very tricky for landing, and it was a little bit like that competition which
Kima mentioned in Granada. There's a huge amount of people having crashes And then my turn came, my crash. I was actually getting—these were the days when we didn't have GPS's. You have to put a pin in the map when you land, and I was actually just on the wrong side of the mountain from goal. I just had to get up this mountain and I'm in goal, and I thought, if I fly down the valley, it'll be further away, away from the goal. So I just land on top of the mountain, and it wasn't right at the top of the mountain. There was a village a little bit further down up on the mountain, and I thought, I'll do one of these fly on the wall landings. And a fly on the wall landing is where you kind of fly at the mountain and you kind of—it's terrifying—and then you sort of fly up and then flare. And I didn't do it very well, and I crashed. I was cast smashed on myself good and proper, because I would have hit the—I hit this dry stone wall at
40-50 k's an hour, or whatever it was, and so I was concussed, put a big hole through my cheek through to my teeth, huge facial lacerations, all the skin ripped off my neck, my ear was hanging off, had a laceration in my eye, and I was unconscious, sprained arm, ribs, knee, and possible broken neck, and there was no radios, and I came round and I thought, "Oh, cripes, not so good," you know? And I was wearing those lycra aero sleeves that one wears, and so I used those as sort of bandage at my face, you know, to hold my face together, so my cheek wasn't flapping around, and I knew there was a village a bit further down, so I started walking. I got to this village, you know, it was all sealing up
And I knocked at the door. A little girl answered, nearly fainted. Anyway, she brought me in, looking after me. By this time, the the village priest turned up and he started. I thought he was giving me the last rites. He was in Latin, in fact. In I think I think he was Catalan. He was speaking, and that was a pretty shit accident, and I ended up being taken to a hospital, a local little clinic, and they were, and I remember they they sewed up my face. Had about 30 stitches in my face, no anesthetic, and then they put a cast on my arm without setting the bone. And then the next day, when they came around to check me, they did some x-rays, and he was holding my head. He was rotating my head, and he said, "We're not quite sure if you've got a broken neck or not."
whilst rotating my head, which was really concerning, but that was pretty much the end of hang gliding for me for a while because I couldn't carry the thing. So that's when I really started getting into the paragliding side of things because paragliders weren't very good at that stage, but it was easier to carry up a hill and into
And also, I began to get a little bit nervous about landing hang gliders after that, so I think for me being like, I'm a super human and I, I'm never going to be okay, whatever happens. And I thought, "Hey, shit, that's a big wake-up call." And I was, then from that day on, a lot more cautious, and probably my learning curve went down on hang gliding. But then I started paragliding, and initially paragliding was terrifying because the thing collapses all the time, which hang gliders didn't tend to do, and but we soon found out that it was okay, sort of. And of course, I had many things near and misses, you know? I had one classic one where I
We're at PWC in Cornet Solo once again. I wasn't flying in the competition, I was the TD, but I was flying the course and we had a very, very good meteorologist, or so we thought, and he said, "There are no problems today with storms. They're all going to be staying in Switzerland. No problems. You may see some big congestions, but absolutely no problem whatsoever." And I was just after flying a bit the course, I was hovering over looking at this huge congestions cloud just over the last turn point. I ran you down saying, "Don't you think that's a little bit big?" And at that moment, lightning broke and we had the whole competition in the air, everyone trying to get down, and of course the gust front came through and everything was getting hoovered up and I was just with my back to the village
full bar, so I wouldn't get blown into it, and then the whole line went completely
behind me, and I was falling out of the sky from about 100 metres, and then by it wasn't going to recover, but by pure luck, by pure luck, the glider went one side of the cable and I went the other side of it, so it kind of bungee jumped me down onto the ground quite safely. No glider, I just swung down under these cables, and I did take my glove off because I flashed past the concrete post and it broke my finger. So that was it, I broke my finger, which wasn't bad really. Steve, where was that? It was currently, that was in Cronitzolo in Italy. Was that the one that Belcourt this
Sounds really familiar. Was that the one that Belcourt threw his reserve and then got pasted on the fence?
may want to be lots people. My wife, she was spiraling down, trying to get down, and she ended up in the lake and had to swim ashore, as did Jill Hartley, the Scottish woman. Loads people were slapping into the ground. Luckily, a lot of boggy ground around the lakes there, and people would have thought it may have been Bill did that. Yeah, I think it was. He was
real low, and you know, just getting smacked all over the place, and the gust front, and you know, fight, and then through, and then his reserve was on one side of the fence, and it was blowing so hard, but he was on the other side of the fence, so you can imagine like a chain link fence, so it just basically sucked him up into the fence, and it was blowing
I guess there were some Italians out on their porch, looking on with interest, and it's quite a funny story. It
was kind of, it was remarkable, and nobody was seriously hurt. Well, nobody was hurt, everyone got down. So many people had big stories to tell, and but no one was hurt. And you know, I took, I lost half the lines on my glider, but that was nothing compared to what could have happened. And of course, in 2009, I had my big accident, my proper accident, which really hurt me. But up until then, you know, the usual sprained ankles and things like that. But apparently, it had been reasonably nice to me. But there you go, what can you say to people? Yeah.
You're not invincible. Take it easy and fly something within your capabilities.
which I am doing now; it's all still
There's, I mean, and I was on the—I was on the rescue, but we still, they haven't really released the full, full details of QE because they're still trying to figure out exactly what happened. So I won't go there at all, but the real takeaway for me—and this actually came from Josh Cohn, and he's always very thoughtful about these kind of things—but it was just a very good reminder
that we and our gear have limits, and we need to be aware of them and not—we don't know yet the gear side of Kiwis, but it's, you know what I do know is that he was definitely, he'd been a little bit tired. He was kind of tired down in Texas, he was tired the weekend before I saw him in Nevada. You know, it's a huge air place and very remote, but very much like the Sierras. The listeners that have flown out in the Owens, it's kind of like that. And you know, so you just have to be, I think you just have to be mindful of every day where you are, you know? And I think with Kiwi, it was, he definitely wasn't as
robustly, you know, energetic as I've seen him in the past, you know, I think he was definitely he
was
55, you know, I think most—you've got to appreciate as you get older, your reflexes are no longer what they were as you get older. And I certainly, I know I plateaued years ago, and I think I'm going down in skills, really, and I certainly know that I'm certainly not as brave as I was. And for that reason, I'm not prepared to, to try and fly things which are beyond my capability, or I try my hardest to keep out of situations which might stretch me. And, but of course, every now and again, the thing with paragliding is that you do end up in those circumstances where they can change, or you might get low in a place you didn't expect to be low, where the landings aren't so good. So, when a rough is presented with circumstances which might be just beyond our limits, and sometimes
Luck's in our favour, but often it's not. And what you need to do is put things in a stack—the odds in your favour by flying with the right equipment, getting the right skill set, doing SIVs, all those things you need to do, which can be a bit time constraints, but it is an extraordinarily dangerous sport we do. It's very fulfilling, very enjoyable, but it's the
Consequences of making a humdrum mistake when you're having a bad day can be long lasting, very painful, or fatal.
That's great place to end, I think. Steve, that's some very good advice there at the end, but thank you for sharing all that. You're kind of rolling on some stories there; I think we need to tap back into some more of those at some point. Those are terrific, but thanks for sharing the 2011 comp. I don't know that everybody heard the full story there, so it was great to hear that, and thank you for sharing your life of flight with us. It's been many, many decades here, and I hope there's many more to come. Thank
you for having me
cool, I just noticed we're 90 minutes in, so that was a really good spot to end, although we don't need to end if you have anything else to add or throw in that you want to. Let's do it now, and we'll slide it in, I just thought I wanted to end on that one because that was a great
natural end
I think we've covered an
hour and a half or so we've been at it, I think so. Yeah, that's fine by me. Yeah, cool.
How did you break your arm? How did that accident go? What happened?
It was. I live a few k's from the village in a log house, and I've got a few nearby landings fields, which are quite tight, but they're okay. And it was a day when all the gliders my clients are just a landed, and it was becoming stormy, and I thought, rather than land in my own house and go have a coffee, see the dogs, and I
set up to go into this field I flown into hundreds of times, and of course, because of the storms, which were just, you know, the winds are a little bit squirrely, and it was a different approach, and I was trying to lose a bit of height by doing a steep turn. I was flying a Mantra 4, I think it was at the time, and I just tip stalled in, and so I had to recover, and by then I dived into an area which is my house is out in the boonies, but there's some other houses nearby, and I was flying over someone's house with cables and things, and I got near the road, and I was boxing by cables, so I had to hit the cable, maybe at neck height.
I just had to force stall the glider over the road at about
10 meters, or something like that, so
I just
force stalled it down onto concrete, which was... I had to hold it so it wouldn't spin my hands down, and I went in heavily and my body collapsed and I kind of
think all the force went through my right arm, and it just shattered it. It was an open fracture, and I lost the elbow. I lost the osseal membrane, which is the membrane which goes between the cubital and the radius, and that never heals. So I lost the rotation in the arm, and I had two
other accidents on skateboard when I was a kid, and so that arm had been just
and I took some tendons out on the shoulder, so it was all focused on the arm, but it was a really bad injury and so it sectioned lots of nerves. So I had lots of parasympathetic pain, which only went away a couple years ago, and it's still shit, but it was just one of those accidents—an embarrassing accident, nothing
heroic about it. It was one of those ones which you wouldn't... it was like, I always think I'd hate to die coastal soaring. That would be embarrassing. It's like one of those accidents where trying to land on a reasonably okay day near your house, cock it up, but
Yeah, it was a hard one, and it was kind of on top of all that emotional shit I had from the world. It wasn't a good place for quite a few years, really, but no, likely I was still able to fly the next season. I was able, at least flying able, still work, so it could have been worse, but she
Does, but not very much. She was a Spanish champion in about '98, I think it was, but she had a cancer diagnosis about 3-4 years ago, so that was a big setback for her. We got kids in her teens, and of course, once the kids came through, she was pretty much stopped. She started again; she's done a few flights this year, just evening stuff, very gentle, but she hasn't got the fire she was to be really keen, but
She's managed to keep her happy, unfortunately.
I'm still a little bit hooked up on the drug, but not so much as I was. But obviously, you are as well; you've got a different—you're very much an extreme. Is there going to be an X-Alps next year?
Yeah, yeah, I've signed up for one more. I really didn't think I was going to after the last race. I, you know, the the 2015 and 2017, I mean, I was already thinking about the next one during the race. You know, it's just like, "God, this, this is just so fun, this is so outrageous," and I love my team. And, you know, it was real obvious, and after 2019 it wasn't nearly as obvious. Partly, it was a number of things. You know, I didn't like all the way points; I thought that was kind of ridiculous. We basically all just kind of followed each other around; it wasn't, you just couldn't make moves like you could earlier. And then the other just big reality was, you know, obviously I'm not getting any younger, but it's the pace is just getting outrageous.
And, you know, it was real obvious to me that it wouldn't matter how much I trained. I just, you know, I'm always pretty fast on the ground, especially for the way I'm built. Like, I'm not built like a Goosele Bower, I'm not tall.
the
best
race I've ever had in terms of just everything, you know, the team and the strategy and the training and the physical prep, and we just, you know, we kind of figured it out, and yet it was still just kind of middle of the pack. You know, I placed 12th, and back in 2015, it was 8th, and I guess that gave me this like false hope that, oh well, you know, if I work really hard at this, I could, you know. So anyway, I got wrapped up in the numbers rather than just the awesomeness of it, because it is just awesome, but the reality was just like, God, you know, that these younger guys are just getting better and everything's getting faster, and you know, it's, it's becoming less and less adventure and more and more just crazy pace and
So anyway, I wasn't as excited coming out of this one to do it again, but then of course, you know, you have a year thinking about it and pondering it and talking to your team, and because my team, they're really excited to do it again, it is just really fun. So I'm trying to figure out, you know, how to separate more from like attainment and more just the process, and so in a sense, I have quite different goals going into this one, which may end up being quite freeing and, you know, allow me to do even better in the end, but I'm trying not to have that. You know, it's one thing to say, well, I don't care about the results, but I'm trying to have that not be nearly
It equals to have a lot of fun. I honestly, I don't know that we're going to get to go do it, you know? I think they'll have the race, but I'm not very confident Americans are going to be able to even travel over there by then, but we'll see, hopefully, but
It's just such a remarkable thing in, you know, for me it's a shame. It's like one of the ultimate sporting which you can do, I think, you know, but it hasn't got the media interest, has it? Really, just like many things, paragliding on the whole, people don't appreciate it. That is such a fantastic adventure. This whole thing, they are doing a lot better than most events, but it's, you know, if you compare it to like motor kart racing, which is so tedious and it's got all that exposure, and you've got this, this real adventure, you know, with like the complexity tactics
you know, spectacle, and nobody's interested, you know? Yeah, and
risk and all these, I mean, you know, when you think about just like ultrathons, I always describe it to people like, well, think, think ultrathon every day, but for 12 days, but you're carrying your pack and you're flying a ton in often really dicey conditions, but they still don't really get it. I mean, that's the thing, it's just, it's not relatable, it's not golf.
But, but it is, you know, I can't remember what your question was. Oh, I mean, I'm definitely, you know, so I just, I have a little girl, she's three, and you know, I am definitely, I'm a little concerned actually going into this one because I'm noticing that I, you know, I'm, you know, there's just physical things like my vision is not, you know, what it was even two years ago. My vision's going, you know, I'll be forty-nine in this next one, and you do start to have a much different approach to risk, and you know, I think that that will
Hopefully, that will kind of evaporate during the race, because you get in these weird mind where you just, you become very strong in your mind during the race, and you know you've trained for it, and you just start really believing in yourself and you fly, In conditions that I think typically would be pretty nerve-wracking, and you just got it. And I don't even think they're more dangerous; it's just because you really are in the right head space for it. But you know, like your story of doing the fly on the wall landing, you get in this head space where you're not going to screw it up, but at the same time, it's like, yeah.
I don't know, that maybe I'd be in the same head space of it without my daughter. I'd still be struggling with that, just because that's what happens when you get older, but certainly having my daughter has spotlighted it more for me. I don't really want to come home now these days, like you said, it's not something you're thinking about when you're 20.
Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of risk that exceed because, you know, I mean, that's... well, we didn't speak about it in the talk, but you know, that as a competition pilot, or as a meet their action, you've got to understand that people's acceptance of risk, the way they fly, changes dramatically when they're put in a competition environment. They start taking these insane risks, which they would not normally take, and for what reason? Because there's no big prize money, there's only kudos, and at the end of the day, that kudos doesn't go very far because, you know, we often may ask this question: who knows who the world champion is at the moment? You know, you ask that competition pilot at an event
And there's a lot of head-scratching, and so you say, "Christ, why do they think it's worth taking a risk?" Because they're not going to be
Not worth it, but people do, and it's just the way humans are made. You put them in a competition environment and people push themselves a little bit more than they should normally, really. That can be a problem, so
Yeah, that's a good one. It would have been a good one to talk about that, although we are now—I'm still recording, so we can maybe throw that in. That's an interesting one, isn't it? Because it's a real... we've all heard that a bunch of times. There's not even glory, let alone money. Literally, like you said, most people in the sport have no idea who won the world last year, and no one cares. You have this real problem with ego. It does really happen in the X house; it happens all the time. And that's, I think, a different driver for sure. A lot of that is just the lack of wanting to walk more, and there's a lot of things that really do make you do silly stuff over and over again.
But like I said, I'm toying with saying something really stupid and dangerous, but there hasn't been the
ultimate accident there, and I think that's just because you do train
A lot for it, so the people are naturally resilient; they're able to bounce better. But you just get in this funny frame of mind that I very often can't get in when I'm just normally flying. And I think when we go to competitions, we're offloading even more responsibility; we're not even paying attention to the weather, we're just—I think we're often really then flying on ego and desire for the podium, or something that is really not why we should be doing it.
There's a lot of herd instinct where people are flying. You have to be very careful with the task design because anyone who's flown a few comps will realize at some stage most people have stories, "Oh my god, we had to fly into this turn point, which was in this valley in the road turn." We were risk analytes to complete the course and they didn't cancel the task, so we had to do this. And you often hear this story, especially in the early days when there's no GPS and they had to use a building or something, and you're sending people into quite conflicting spaces, and that does happen. So you have to be really careful as a task
committee to make sure that you've designed a task which isn't going to be in any way problematic, and then you've got to realise that if it is problematic, these guys on the whole, they're not thinking rationally and they're going to do it anyway. And there's many cases where you're flying—I remember flying with Mike Watts at this event where we did have a fatality. It was a really windy day when the mist was blowing in France, but
set
the task further down the Dormius range out of the magic bubble, and I was flying along recently up at the front with Mike Watts, and I thought, "When we get to this valley, we're not going to be stupid enough to carry on into the real mountains; we're just going to land there." We're all at the same point, and we got there, and Mike went in, and we ended up having
place further than the mountains, because coming back into the howling wind was impossible, and one person who tried it was killed. And it was a very bad task setting, and of course, if we'd have had a normal sensible, if we'd rationalized it a little bit better, we'd have just landed in a nice, safe, easy place. Nobody got any points, somebody died, and it was fantastic. Maybe in the exile
points, you are flying more on your own. You have to make a lot more decisions on your own, rather than just following the herd. Then, perhaps it is safer as a competition format, yeah.
And you have this, you do have more of a longevity approach to it all. You're never thinking about Monaco during the race, you're just thinking about the next move. And I think it is about the, you know, you recognize if you wreck yourself or even just roll an ankle, your race is over, you know? So I think there is a bit more of a preservation side of it, but there's also just—I mean, there's been, we were laughing the other day telling stories about—there's just so many times where you do things that you know I can still stand by them now. I really have
But if you were an outsider looking at some of the things I've done, you'd go, "You're crazy." Then you're telling yourself a complete lie, but like I said, you just get in this frame of mind where you know launching cross and 40k an hour is totally reasonable. You've trained for it, you've got that move. It's not really that reasonable, it's just... it's, and the other one is just how many times I've flown down a canyon that had nowhere to land. You know, just in my mind, what's the X up? I have to keep going. There will be a place to land, there always has been. And one time there wasn't. I landed in the trees and didn't
even slow me down, it was, you know, where's usually that'd be kind of a high adrenaline event, just landing in
I think that's the addiction part of it. I mean, I think a bigger part of the addiction is, like you said, it is a drug, and it's a very intense drug. For 12 days, you're basically in flow for 12 days straight, and there's not that many ways to get there, and so I think that's why we're all addicted to flying is we like that flow channel state, and the X helps is like
It's a springboard into that state, and you just get to stay there the whole time.
go on to that risk taking. There's a perfect example: that world championship in the
year 2000 where Kiwi did the article I think it was one of the last days we had an awful forecast I think it was 78 just 500 meters above the top, And we were up on the sea station, and it was just awfully windy, and the cast was going to be cancelled, but the Spanish thought they'd have a bit of fun, so they went ahead and started doing the briefing and saying, "These are the conditions. We just want you to stay low today. It shouldn't be too turbulent, and we don't want you to go to the valleys because it's blowing 100 kilometres an hour in the valleys." And they did a straight-faced task.
briefing, and of course, there were some people going, "These Spanish guys are crazy, trying to kill us," but they were taking their notes, and one of the Swiss guys got up and said, "You can't do this," but the Spanish guy carried
on through it, and people were getting really angry and really up tight, and of course they should be because it was launchable because we're in the lee, but it was a joke
and everyone thought we might die doing this, but that was the task, and the guys started getting their gear ready and
Of course, they were only joking, but that was an illustration of the fact that people are thinking, "This is extraordinarily dangerous. This is beyond anyone's capabilities." But other people do it. I better get ready as well, and crazy, I
hadn't heard that one. That's great. Well,
Steve, this is a real honor. We'll have to do this in person someday soon. I'd love to fly with you, and all this COVID is behind us. We put this awful year in our rear and go flying together. But thank you for your terrific illustrations, and thank you for giving so much to this sport over the last 30-something years. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
No worries. Hopefully, you're recovering very quickly from your COVID experience and wish you well. Thank
You, I appreciate it. Yeah, cheers.
Talk to you soon, okay?
all right
bye now
if
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