Thank you for watching. 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. So the point here 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. They've 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 no joke. And you also have to go through the emotional side. It's pretty scary. It's... Um... 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 miracle around the corner. And it'd 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 a lot coming down the wire on this one.
And we just... We 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 and racial justice, income inequality, the American dream, snow. 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.
Not just for the people who are voting. Not just for the people who are voting. Not just for the people who are voting. 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. 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 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 whether you 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. 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 meet director and been involved in more than 60 competitions, including really big comps like the Worlds and the Europeans and a bunch of World Cups. He was really the person who put Pedra Gita in Spain on the competition map and has over the years... Been on the British team a number of times. 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 really famous 2011 comp in Pedra Gita with all the tragedy, which we go into in depth in this conversation.
But he had his own personal accident after 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 of Kiwi's great articles about his road to Macedonia and his Worlds attempt that he did in Cross Country Magazine. And then he illustrated my coronavirus comp.
He was little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little pretty excited about flying it but didn't have the skills to do so. So that world's event, day two in Peterhita, 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. So yeah, a lot of fallout, a lot of changes. That was Steve's 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 to the end and some great history here and great advice and I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you did 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 podcast. I'm very protective of my Australia PWC helmet bag that's got your awesome illustrations all over it. I'd love to meet you in person someday. You've been at this for an awfully long time. I actually didn't know how long until you sent me 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. I thought we might have a very interesting point. I think that in your history and in the history of the sport might be to ping off right with Peter Heda in 2011.
You were the meat director there at that Worlds that was so tragic and really, really changed the dynamic 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 remember indelibly.
Peter Heda was not little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little
little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little because running up 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 them. 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, with the possible bad weather and, you know, a lot of pilots turned up with very little airtime. And we also started hearing stories of, you know, 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, you know, Alex Hoffer, who was the European champion back in the early 2000s, where he had an accident, broke his back. And, you know, 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 the, when all the pilots turned up, you know, I was obviously concerned. I spoke to Russ Ogden, who's a good friend for many years. And of course he works with ozone and 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, you know, the pilots. The obligatory safety briefing that we were to do to tell them how to actually find these guys. And more importantly, how to recover. And of course, Russell being what he is, it was very well. I don't want to teach. It's like teaching granny suck X. You know, it's not, you know, these are all good pilots. They should know, but I'll tell them anything. And of course he stood up and went through this lots of hand gestures, you know, this out in the other.
And I was not looking at him. I was looking at the pilots in law. Them. How they were a gog really, you know, what, you know, we have to do that. What's what's a bank flying? What's all this? What's all the other. And I know the story was the gliders only need a low test and then neither the video of the test pilot recovering from those events. But of course it didn't always have to recover. We just have the video of recovering on three or four occasions. Apparently. Then I asked Russell, 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,
Steve are the majority of the pilots. Was this the R 10?
No, this is the R 11. The R 10 had been out the year before. So this is the R 11 and of course, gin and a number of other manufacturers. They also had their versions of two. Liners. Um, but you know, the, the, the key lies with the boomerang and the, and the R 11. And on the first day we had no instance. So Peter is, um, was recognized for its convergence flying. So you get very strong convergence lines over flat lands and you do huge tasks here quite easily. Um, and first day was an excellent day. We had 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, you know, gliders just didn't fly very far.
You know, they were sort of very much sort of fishbowl tasks in the PWC. Uh, when I announced this task of 175 kilometer gold task, you know, people said, yeah, it's impossible. And I remember Richard Gallo coming up to me 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 that 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, we, for the first 65 cage, you can fly as high as you like.
And it was a day where 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 audio visuals, um, a lot of people buy 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. I made it in 1995, but I think it was 120 out of the field of 150 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 saying, get back.
Cause of course we deleted the ones 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. Uh, 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 average, 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. Guiders C class gliders. And it's the sort of the milk run we do and flying to Athens 55, 60 Ks. And, um, 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 it and Francisco, and also just. Oh man.
Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man.
Oh man. Oh man. Vargas, he was before the start gate in very benign conditions coming back from a pre-start gate turn point and I think there was a German pilot who flew through the same area almost just ahead of him, relatively smooth and unfortunately what happened with Francisco Vargas, he had an incident and he ended up being in a full stall trying to hold the stall but at the last minute I think from witnesses that Glade tried to recover from, he must have let up a little bit and it swung him into the oar and he was essentially killed straight away, we had a pilot landing near him and he thought he was he probably died at that moment and the other incident, the other case was with Aitem
from Chile, where he was actually probably on the final glide to goal alongside a friend of his and I think they were 2,800 metres just on a glide and he took a hit and of course the glider went into a very very quick spiral dive and this later became the reason why we now have to carry two parachutes in category one competitions because it appeared that he got one arm trapped so he couldn't his throw in hand so he wasn't able to access the chute and then he spiralled down from 2,000 down to the ground and probably killed instantly once again and of course with these two fatalities well then of course the whole
panorama of category one competitions changed as you probably know quite for many years and of course even though it was a world class even though it was a world championship we didn't actually have a lot of media going into the event but of course after the accidents then we had just about every radio and TV company in Spain hovering around the world. And of course after the CIVL
after a day or two of deliberation we decided to cancel the rest of the competition we had flown enough tasks for it to be validated and then that was essentially a banning of the open class glider for a number of years until the competition class was sorted out.
What became of the competition class? What became the CCC class? It took a couple of years didn't it? It
took some time.
After 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 for me that was the end of running competitions and it was going to be my last event we'd run perhaps 60, 70 international events since the early 90s and it was just too much really to comprehend it just didn't seem worth going on doing more events as time went on of course time heals all etc etc but I really kind of moved away from following events and taking too much interest in what was happening as far as competition
design and development went for me. I think I was in the same place 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 CCC competition class but I do know there are a lot of people who really love their gliders the R11 for example and there are people that we had a Belgian pilot looking at quite recently he's still got his which 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 they were exceptional gliders you know maybe we'll say they were almost possibly more performant than some of the guys we have today I don't know because I don't fly modern competition gliders at the moment but it certainly caused
a lot of problems you know internationally for the events you know everyone's had to let them fly serial class and then of course the serial class you know we've been through this whole serial class many years before in the 90s and then in 1998 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 national events you know 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 the national discovering PWC the merits
especially the European pilots because before about 1994 most of the PWC tasks were in Europe and they were very much sort of fishbowl tasks 40, 50 Ks and occasionally 60 and then here in 95 we were suddenly doing these huge tasks because we were able to you know lines of convergence and even with the gliders at the time we did 140 K out in return 60 people in gold this big 175 K gold and lots of other exciting things and so we were sort of the flavor we were the Peter Eads 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
podcast the other day and he was talking about this time as well where gliders were beginning to get a little bit problematic and difficult to fly and there were
accidents in many comms and then once again 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 at our event as well it was actually mid-air soon after launch so probably you couldn't really say was it anything to do with the gliders I don't think so actually because actually the accident that day was instigated by a pilot flying a what would have been a DHV-23 back in those days which would have been like a C-class glider 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 fact that it was dangerous gliders but it was on top of all the other accidents and competencies at that time which then brought about the the the the!
little little
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little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little really if you're going to world's events and some people are flying zero and 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 struggled along for quite a few years and it became this and it was successful in many ways because it did give people that option to take a slightly less risky route and also if we go back to the 90s and maybe even the early 2000s there were some really nice open class gliders the real hot ships the ones you ran really really well but you couldn't get your hands on because they were reserved for the the factory factory pilots so it's also caused a certain amount of resentment that um people couldn't get the good couldn't get these good gliders um
but that was another kind of worms back in the 90s of course and moving back to 2000s and 11 when we've got the same problem but this time the ci girls took you know definitive action and said that's enough and serial class only but of course this the serial class gliders soon came to resemble very much the uh the open class gliders in 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 i remember 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 a lot of the pilots that are lighter which of course makes me really feel for the the typically the women pilots who were 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 it must have just been emotionally not just from the not just from the tragedy of the two deaths obviously but just everything else it must have just been quite a soup that you were in uh
yes it certainly was i mean well going back to the the weighting that is an anecdote from the on the first day of the um the world's here but then we only had one chinese pilot that that year and it was a girl i can't remember her name unfortunately and she was very lightweight probably about 40 40 45 kilos and most teams would come with the systems which they had to pay to pay for and most teams would come with one or two assistants i believe the chinese had four assistants one pilot but it was she was carrying huge amount of ballast she was flying she's 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 a little of hammock 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 way there and then he said we can carry all that balance so he took the ballast off her and of course that made her completely unsafe so and she subsequently took off and flew out had a deflation through a reserve and um we later had to recover her from a tree so you know some of these rules which were implicated about because 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
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 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 potentially and it's it becomes really challenging for takeoff and landing and obviously for landing you know after you've just flown a comp and uh you're tired and yeah it can be real risky i i don't i can't remember if that was a contributing factor and seiko's accident i think when she broke 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 it's it's for me it was always the 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 janoway you know he can he's come up with this new format uh for a competition of which i cannot tell you the whole details or they explained it 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 the event in they're doing some really good stuff yeah
yeah so uh because it's always been a bit of a bug there with bruce as well because um yeah bruce probably weighs around 65 70 kilos and uh you know his his observation was you know it was all the big butch guys who are winning especially in the early days and i think it became less important in the in the uh early 90s that people were sort of flying a huge glider you know like 32 square meters carrying vast amount of water um just because it gave them a big edge and um and bruce is where i was obviously aware of that and we all are and um so yeah maybe uh brett janoway's um i think he's trying to get some form of 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
and was was your decision to stop running comps literally because of what happened in 2011 or was it just because of the fact that you were running comps and you 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 worlds in 2011 was really to save the site here because um if you're not right 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 peter although it's directly above peter doesn't actually belong to peter because about 200 years ago the the duke of alba who was a local aristocrat who's got he was building a palace here and uh he obviously couldn't squeeze enough taxes out of the local um serfs and uh he went to a nearby village and he asked 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 a flock of i know with a uh a bunch of goats so clip the clock you know this this other guy from the nearby town he took away most of the mountain including the takeoff so peter even 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 90s the problem we had although peter is 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 peter um and all the infrastructure was impuderator but this small village of 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 and uh eventually
the provincial government uh stepped in and they uh 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 to take off and they bar they put a bar wire across right across the middle of the takeoff and 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 everything well these guys are trying to kill us you know by putting by wire all over the takeoff and then further further in the game we had a bar wire and we had a bar wire and we had a bar wire negotiation and you know with the with the politicians 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 were quite happy seeing 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 the takeoff 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 ecological ecologically aware and uh wanted their clean energy and the 30 000 euros per year for the each windmill and so there's a bit of fight you know we had a big struggle and demonstrations
uh marches roadblocks and eventually
little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little So the whole thing went into a bit of a collapse, to get the things going back again, to get the town hall and provincial government on our side. What's better than the World Championships?
So in we went to and we bid for the World Championships. We got it. And of course, that allowed huge infrastructure. We now got 3,000 square metres of 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.
The last World Championships I did with the British team was in Manila in Australia in 2007.
Bruce won. Yes, he did. And I thought, well, I did quite well because I won a couple of events before in Manila. God be when it is. Open 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, this world. Because I've been to other worlds and I didn't do particularly well, to be honest. And it was going OK. Was it going OK? Not really, because we had pretty poor weather, as often happens. Manila is a fantastic venue. And then along came the World Championships and poor us. We all had this really suboptimal. Bad weather, lots of clouds, storms. The week before we had the experience with Eva Wisniewska, if you remember, the girl who went up into the QNIM to 10,000 meters.
Because I was there, I was actually just underneath there. And I mean, that was just crazy, crazy. It was an open distance competition, which Godfrey was running the week before. And I took off and I was top of the stack first to leave. I went off. It was a bit of a challenge. There's a big congested cloud forming downwind. I thought, no thanks. Or go crosswind. And it was open distance. You could go any direction you wanted to. But I thought, well, no one's going to get towards that big congested sky. It's going to 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 I kept on off 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. And I was kind of going in the same direction. as everyone else. Meanwhile, there's another big congested sky about 20 kilometers further to the right of track. And 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 were still gaps. And I was just flying straight through. Lots of people were still climbing. And 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 a particularly brave person anymore. And I just kept on pushing, pushing, pushing, got beyond that. And looking back, you can see the shelf of the cumulus. And there were people, they were just climbing underneath it. And there's only about three people ahead of me, I think.
Everyone was trying to get high. I didn't worry about the height. I think David Dagao was ahead and two or three others. But as I was pushing into the blue, I got lower. I could feel the wind was changing. It was all being hoovered back into the cumulus. So I didn't take any climbs. It would have just drifted back into the cloud. I landed very, 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 shelter. And then when the rain eased off, a car pulled up. It was a German team leader, Stefan Marsch. And the last coordinator he had was above that shack. And it was pretty much where I was watching those people rather foolishly take a climb into the cumulus. So I was going in.
And well, so there I was that day. And then the week after midnight. So going back to my last competition. I thought I might do quite well. But unfortunately, it was pretty shit weather. Which wouldn't have been so bad because I'm British. I'm kind of used to bad weather and mincing around.
But I was flying Bruce's new FR4. This is a real banana. It was a one in eight aspect ratio glider. It was a three liner. And it didn't have any possibility of big earring. Or I think you could be lying. But Bruce said, maybe not. It's a little bit exciting.
And with the competition with so many clouds around, you know, you kind of couldn't control your height very well. So 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 and bad days. As a whole, the British team were doing okay. In fact, three days before the end of the event, we were actually on the podium as a team. We would have been on the podium. And Bruce was winning. And then we thought, well, okay. I was sort of fighting it. I was probably about 20 or something. Not so bad. Not so awful. And I'm not being glad. Actually, I might have been worse than that. But I wasn't too embarrassingly bad.
And we were going to be on the podium as a British team. I was like, hey, ho. And it was bad weather. And it was looking like it was going to be bad weather. And we thought, great. May it rain for the last day. Because Bruce will win. And we'll win. And 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 don't want to fly. And then we had to fly. And both, I think it was myself, Mark, and Russell, we all just had a bummer. Woof. But Bruce, superstar, managed to get into the gold, took the world. And the rest of us had a good old cry because we were no longer on the podium. And 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-rolls in 2009.
But it was all sort of on the downhill slope for me then, really. And then, of course, I 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 I want to go out with a fantastic, exceptional event. It was going to be flabbergasted every day, big epic tasks and everything you want in a competition. And I was going to be, you know, Lord is a superstar and a master and a media actor. And of course, it didn't turn out that way. It didn't turn out to be anything like that at all. It turned out to be a tragic nightmare. And it turned out to be what it was, which we've already discussed.
I was in a pretty bad way that year. And then I had a really bad accident myself, personal accident. Just nothing spectacular. You know, all the really bad accidents, you know, just stupid things. I managed to mash myself up really badly and shattered my right arm. And that left me in pain for five years, pretty bad pain. And I lost the use of my arm pretty much. It's still locked in that. I haven't got much movement on it. But for some, for many years, I was able to fly. But I went back to flying B-class gliders. And I couldn't really consider flying the competition then on. And then I kind of fell out of the habit.
And I actually began to... realize how much... how liberating not flying competitions is. Because, of course, when you fly a competition, you're pretty angry most of the time. Because nobody... Unless you win. It's a pretty annoying experience sometimes. Because there's a lot of pressure. And if you don't do well, you can... you get pretty pissed off. And I... And as a meat director running competitions, also, you've got, you know, 150 people who have... who are on there all pretty pissed off a lot of the time as well. Because, you know, there's only one guy who wins at the end of the competition. So it was, in a way, liberating for a few years. But then, you know, of course, the town hall here, okay, hey, what's going on?
We need, you know, we need competitions. And luckily, other people kind of stepped up. Actually, Lodi, the chap who was the other organizer of the Worlds, he wanted to carry on running Spanish events. So he was doing some events. So although I wasn't meat director, I started doing the meat air briefing. And then I got roped into doing helping on the task. So I became pretty much the meat director for a number of events here. But I was always a little bit reluctant, shall we say. But then a few years ago, I was run up by some nice people in Colombia and asked me to help out with an event in Roland.
So I went there. And that was a different experience. It was more of a fun event. And most of the people were happy most of the time, which was refreshing.
It's such a consistent place, isn't it? I mean, I think people are happy when they get to fly every day. And that's the nice thing about Roland Nios. You've just got pretty consistent weather.
Yeah. And also, I think a lot of people go there not really for the event. These were open events, sort of fun events. And of course, there was a series. There were various guys.
And a lot of American guys. 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. Or do this again if they ask me again. And they did this year and I think one other time. So who knows? Who knows?
One of the problems we have with comps in the States is no one can figure out how to cover their costs. So 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 we don't have 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, we've never really figured it out like Miguel and his whole Alas Del Hombre team has done in Valle or it sounds like you've done in Piedrahita. Is that?
No, no, no, no, no. We haven't done this. That's been the big problem. We've never ever had a sponsor beyond. Well, actually, we've had to rely on the town hall and the provincial government throwing some money. And I did actually have, you know, you've heard of Red Bull, I guess. Obviously, the Red Bull, they sponsored us in the, it was a PWC or the Europeans back in the mid 90s. Do you know what they sponsored us with? Well, they turned out with a couple of cars. They had some girls in bikinis hanging out Red Bull and they lent us a tent. And I think we got two crates of Red Bull out of it. And I had to pay, I had to drive the tent back to Madrid.
Thank
you very little, Red
Bull. It 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 in, but after 1990, I've already mentioned the PWC. And the PWC was 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.
But we knew how much it's going to cost. And 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 another tragic death. I wasn't so keen, but the tunnel were pressuring me to run in a PWC event. So 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, there's people like Harry Bunz, Hans Bollinger. And it was mainly pilots who were, and they were looking, you know, what pilots want, which is great. But of course, sometimes you need to, actually the guys were putting their neck out to run the event.
And sometimes with the organizers, they felt that they needed to get some input from there. So I was on the PWC and I requested running another event, PWC, although I didn't really want to. So we got PWC for 99. And the Pantanal said, yeah, yeah, we'll back you up. You know, and I said, this is going to cost a lot of money. You know, we've got to pay the quota, PWC. They said, no worries. We've got loads of people we can ask for sponsorship. Great. Because, you know, I'm completely rubbish in any form of trying to get sponsorship. But you go ahead and knock yourself out. Great. Fantastic. And so we went ahead with getting everything going. You know, the entropy started coming in. And I think it was about a month before I went to the town hall. And unfortunately, they'd had an election in the meantime.
And some of the counselors had changed. And I said, hey, how are you getting on with all these sponsors? And they said, oh, well, I think we're going to cancel. I think we're going to cancel because we can't. We haven't found anyone. And what? We're kind of a month or so away. The money was in. People had their flights booked. And we had to go ahead with the event. So we had the entropy money. So I spoke to Xavier Murillo, who was going to be my TD for that event, and Fred the Screamer and Mandy, who were going to be the scorers. So in those days, it was just a very small team. Now, things have changed in the PWC. Now they have their whole team. And the organizers, there's very little part of them putting up the show. They're just a shell infrastructure.
But in those days, it was slightly different. But I would normally have to pay for their flights across. I said, hey, Xavier, jump in 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 lose some trucks? And of course, it turned out to be every single day was flyable and good. So all the expenses were there. But we ran the event. And there was a lot of hassle. And 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.
It's a lot of
work to make even. That's the problem. With the potential to have lost a lot of money. So that was the end of it for me for running for the PWC without, you know. I actually had the written thing stamped, signed, sealed in the town hall at that time. And so when we went to the Worlds, I made sure that, you know, the mayor of Pieterieta came with me to Austria with some of the councillors. And we did the presentation together. And it was all seen as them being the organisers. Although really it's a local club. You know, they were the front men. So they were going to get all the kudos. And they were going to 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 Worlds in 2011.
But there is a waste. 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 all a lot about that side of it. He's obviously got it pretty figured out down in Mexico. Although with COVID, it's proving challenging for everybody, obviously. But, yeah. 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 did your arm in. 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, you know, since I was, you know, 18 or 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, I lost interest in the competitions. 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. So I started 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 a board at the right angle, I could slide my arm across and draw by sliding the pen across there. And I started going digital, which is even slightly out of the screen. And then I started messing around with animation, which is something I wanted to do for years as well. And I think I put something up about a little thing about the evolution of paragliding, hand gliding. And Ed from Cross Country Magazine saw it. And at that time, he was looking to inject a bit of sort of illustration cartoons in the 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 sport.
But within that range of people, within the sport, there are many stereotypes. And so there 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, the Ragnar's team.
They were great. And of course, you illustrated for Kiwis, you know, Gun for the Worlds. Those were really terrific.
Yeah. And I really enjoyed them. Oh, little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little years and he's very gregarious of a extroverted guy and um and then um but i'd never really seen him do much flying he'd always be turning up he turned up at the worlds in portugal and he was covering that event and of course he did that wow he talked about his first piece for xv magazine the article he did for the worlds in in granada back in i think year 2000 i was at that event and it was uh i thought that was one of the best things i've ever read as far as that was the the best ever review of a paragliding event which is fantastic and uh of course i made some major other events but he was never really flying he was often he was 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's starting his competition thing and um of course he sent me the he sent me the the uh
! the story and uh of course i'm searching for um to find some angle you know a bit of humor this in um because i'm not just gonna i'm not doing sort of a direct reportage i'm taking any little remark he might make and going off in a complete a complete tangent with my with my little my little story yeah they're not just gonna be and of course i picked up on the whole psychedelic thing and uh you know i we had a question and i said well i'm not going to do
little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little Hunter Thompson and you're going to be my
illustrator and he was really fired up and I said yeah great I've done this stuff 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 going to love these and nothing came back and it was quiet radio silence and I thought hey maybe he didn't like them and then Ed rang me I got an email from Ed I'm in the pub with Kiwi he's mad he's 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 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 he wanted to be selected for the paragliding team he didn't want to be seen I don't know I presume I presume that everybody knew about his you know psychedelic you know writing career 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 Kiwi like I do that surprised me I guess what it all comes down to isn't it is you know we all have egos 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 going to 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 that route a couple times in the podcast and he just there was no he just refused yeah well I
guess you know
I guess he wants to be 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 going to do and you know for the last one which never you know there were some fallouts with that particular series he had some fallouts with some people in the in the New Zealand Federation some people didn't like some of the artwork which I did which I tried to explain actually was linked to my you know I did there was one particular picture and because Kiwi was
annoyed at one particular picture because he was pushed off the podium by the meat director who was flying in the event and you know I'm pretty against meat directors flying I can't really see how you can do both those things in fact I did actually do that myself once and I well here's another my accident story I we back in 1994 on my first PWT you know I was a pilot loved flying wanted to fly but I was always flying I was also the meat director so I wasn't going to 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 we had this task and it was a similar route to the previous year I did this big flight and in 93 and I got what was then the European record which was quite big in those days I mean those days it was easy to get records in Europe because anything over 100 was like big stuff and I did about
160k and I ran along the airport in those days of tuning convergence line which was jolly frightening jolly stupid but I survived it and like did a big flight and the year after at PWT 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 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 and so I had to throw my reserve and I threw my reserve and luckily it opened and then I started going up at the reserve because of course there was a QNM above us and then the glider sort of
started flashing over that 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 as I downplayed I was actually very close to goal at this time and being the meat director I thought well I better say something because they all then go watching me and although it had been absolutely terrifying I thought well the parachute's out and I'm now actually descending and I might actually survive this so I better come across as a bit of a hero and I thought so I was thinking what would what would a what would a Spitfire pilot say as he was just about to bail out so I had I really I thought right I was going to say this this is a spot of trouble but it seems to be okay now coming down okay so I thought that's what I was going to say but
I kind of got hold of my radio okay by now I had the glider sort of gathered 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 I was about to say these immortal words and I realised my tongue was so dry and so expanded I was and and then I hit the gas front because I got to lower and then I went oh oh! so I didn't come across as very very brave or very noble at all and I and I hit the ground going extraordinarily fast balanced a few times and I went across luckily we were in this sort of Castilian flatlands and I was dragged across this field at a rate of knots and then luckily there was a field next field coming up didn't have a fence but it was
sunflowers plant field tall sunflowers so that sort of broke the um! the speed of my uh my travel and then shortly after actually the Jocky Sanderson 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 uh yes well that was that was a must do you think I was a meat there actually and I was in the sky and I made a yeah that was very embarrassing for that reason just waited and then a reserve you can't do you you can't do both jobs very effectively and um and going back to Kiwi uh and also so we're talking I was trying to think of pilots 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 and got to goal at 100mph in 75k's and then the meat director told them sorry but you're you've got a zero for the day and um 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 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 you know jackbooted little fascist type which had no resemblance it wasn't a character of anyone in particular it's 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 there was a shadow of two people he'd hung for um airspace infringements but anyway that didn't go over very well with a particular meat director in uh 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 a little bit rightful about a bit riled about that really and uh 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 um spent some quite some time he was bit late on getting the uh 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 I think that's it for this episode of the Road to Macedonia.
little little little little little little
little little little little little little
little little
little little little little little little little from him on, 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, 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.
Cause you can't, you know, be together in large groups and none of that stuff's happening and none of the comps are happening. I just, you know, I don't know what to do with myself. And he, he was, he was laughing at himself. Cause 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 is, it really wasn't almost from the beginning and you're hanging, lighting days and, 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?
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 am out of real habit of crashing hang gliders, but you seem to be able to crash. And the wreckage tends to save you on the home on the whole, although not all of the case, but I don't know why I'm not sure what I would have changed. Um,
you know, I've never been particularly wealthy and 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 the financial constraints were just too much. You know, I was, I was able to go to many events by being, uh, team in the nineties. Most of the events I went to, I was going there working as a, as a team, as a technical delegate for the, for the PWC, which is a role which, um, then took on and really made his own during the two thousands. Um, 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 Australia.
And what I would have liked to have done more, but I, it wasn't really a route for me, a route. So, um, it's the fly guiding. 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, um, you know, during the summer I couldn't really compete. Um, so I don't know, you know, it's, um, who knows how we would change things. You know, perhaps I should have got a proper job when I was younger and done that. But, you know, this, I asked, I do admire, I admire people who can, can, can do both, you know, can have a proper career and also do their paragliding and then be able to put the flying aside in having the 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, um, yeah, just went along this whole poverty stricken, you know, following the flying thing. So yeah, you're in
your, uh, on your website, it said hang gliding ruined any serious career path and you studied zoology and physiology, and then you got into hang gliding sounds like pretty soon, or we're 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. Uh, you know, that, that was a while back, Steve, I, you and I are in the same department here when it comes to getting older in the tooth, but it's, uh, any regrets?
No, no. I mean, I, I, I think I was just, uh, so important to me. You know, I, I had, uh, you know, when I started, I had a sort of one of the pilots in our local club called Mark Haycraft. It was always my guru. Now I think he's won the French exceedingly many times over the last few years where, you know, he used to say, you know, 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 get, 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. Um, but yeah, it was just such a, it's just a, such a demand, uh, 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, and not worry too much about what I'm missing. Um, but yeah, when I was younger, then it was, it was hard to go and go to a normal job and think, Christ, it looks like a good day out there. 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 go, wow, and 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 recognized, I discovered Pedraheat, if you like, and, um, saw the merits before anybody else did, because there was no one really flying here. There's no effective takeoff apart from just taking off from the, the actual side of the road. And by developing the competitions and doing the fly guiding, then it all started to work and it was an income and it works 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 groups of, well, it's, you know, the people that come out to visit me, they're, they come out, they're often the same people every year.
So it's like flying every day. With your mates going XC. So 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 hasn't been, luckily we were able to scrape through and get on the month of the, most of the month of July and August, we were able to fly without restriction and, you know, Yeah. We had a reasonable number of pilots coming out here. So 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 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, I do do tandems. Yeah, but that's very minor part. I, I, I, I, I, I'm, we're mainly working with 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 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 meteor 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 no, no, there's no turn left and right. You know, it's, it's like flying with your mates and that usual interaction which you have.
Can you elaborate on maybe, you know, one or the two, cause you talked about the accident with your arm. Not to delve into the darker side too much in this talk, but I think we can often learn from, from accidents. Sounds like you've had a few. What are, you know, what, 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, I said with hang up, you know, it's sort of, I was going through like it was going out of fashion in the early days. Cause I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I was just young, keen and nothing, you know, the consequences weren't that bad on the whole when I crashed the thing. So, 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 you're learning curve when you're reasonably brave and not so worried about the, the consequences are very good. So I, I think I've got hanged, I mean, I got pretty good, pretty good, pretty good, pretty quick with hang gliding because I was a bit blase to the, to the, to the problems.
Yeah. I landed up. Yeah. I had, I actually had some very new misses. I was, I guess you've heard of Bill Moyes, the Australian famous guy. Well, he was very kind. We went out for, I was my first big hang gliding comp. We went out to go to the Forbes event, which was a tummy event. And we went on to see Bill, you know, this internet, this like God of hang gliding. And he's a, he kind of likes palms 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 toying with him. Now his toying was a, quite a precarious thing. In my opinion, it was very exciting. Basically he'd tie a long line, a washing line to a speedboat.
And then you coil up all this, this line, this rope on the, on the edge of the beach, you click onto the hang glider. And he had some sort of, it's like a motorcycle throttle cable going up to a clip on the, on the nose. And then you sort of lift your leg, you go hurry off on the speedboat. And then when the line goes, there's no more line and then bing, you're off and you sort of climb out and you'd be flying out to sea. And this course, there's no radio. And I think when you get high, that's when you open, you sort of wobble, wiggle your legs around. And that means Bill, I'm about to release. And we had this circumstance where we were, we were, I think, very high, going out to sea, it's fantastic, you know, the dolphins in the bay, it's beautiful. I got that, Bill, me eyes, down there, telling me, it's amazing. And I pulled the clip to take, get rid of the line and it, just jammed.
The, the, the line's attached to the, the hang glider. And I had, you know, a kilometre, I'd say, of line, I was going out to sea, no radio, no idea what to do. And I, I sort of, I wiggled my legs a lot. and I think Bill kind of realised what happened and of course, what are we going to do? Because of course, I can't attach the line it's obviously getting lower, the line would go into the water and I'd just be like direct into the water and luckily, there was like a sandbank further out and he kind of throttled back and he just lowered, 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 he might be kidding me that day but the next day, 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 there whipping away and there's a bit of a long short drift so it's taking the line off one way and then there's the wind coming off to the right and the speedboat's going straight on and I'm thinking, 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 there whipping away and I took a vector of the three, you know and 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 of course I was facing my way both uprights broke and I was dragged across the beach because of the inertia of the boat putting the line and in total, the glider for the day but Bill just wanted to show me that
he likes the school of higher norms 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 it 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 like that so that was mildly uncomfortable around my nether parts that day and then I did have a proper good real hand 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 it's sort of like an alpine environment in the north of Spain in the Pyrenees
and it's a great place it's a fantastic place for power gliding but it's not so good for hand 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 and my crash I was actually getting these were the days when we didn't have GPS's you know, we 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 over this mountain and I'm in goal and I thought if I fly down the valley I'll be further away from the goal so I just land on top of the mountain and it wasn't right on the top of the mountain there was a village you know, 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 thought and I crashed I was concussed smashed on myself for 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 and and I was out there's no radios and I think I came round and I thought oh cripes not so good you know and um and I had to I was wearing those air those lycra arrow sleeves that one wears and so I used those as sort of bandage at my face you know to hold my face together so I wouldn't my my cheek wasn't flapping around and I knew there's 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 you know nearly fainted
the the village priest turned up and he started I thought he was giving me the last rites he was Latin in fact in retrospect I think I think it was Catalan he was speaking and anyway 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 faked they sewed up my face had about 30 stitches in my face no anaesthetic and then they put the they put a cast on my arm without without setting the bone and then the next day when they came around to check me they 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 my head
which was really concerning and but that was pretty much the end of hang gliding for me for for a while because I couldn't carry the things so that's when I really started getting into the paragliding side of things because it was paragliders weren't very good at that stage but it was easier to carry up a hill and into a rig and it wasn't so tough on the 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 superhuman and I you know I'm never going to I'm going to be okay whatever happens and I thought hey shit you know that's a big wake-up call and I 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
I was like
oh shit and and then initially paragliding of course was terrifying because the thing collapses all the time which hang gliders didn't tend to do and but we soon right I found out that it was okay sort of and of course I I had many things and near and misses you know I had one classic one where I where PWC and Cornet Solo once again I wasn't flying in the competition I was the TD but I was flying in the competition and I was flying in the course and we had a very very good meteorologist or so we thought and he said oh no problems today with storms they're all going to be staying in Switzerland no problems you may see some big congestus but absolutely no problem whatsoever and I was just after flying a bit the course coming corners I was hovering over gold looking at this huge sort of congestus cloud just just hot over the last turn point I ran
I went down on I ran you down saying don't you think that's a little bit big and then at a moment you know lightning broke and oh hell broke loose and we had the whole competition in the air everyone trying to get down 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 just went in pieces and went it went completely behind me and I was falling out of the sky from about 100 meters and then by it wasn't going to recover but by pure luck by pure luck the glider went one side of the cable this it was a telephone cable and I went the other side of it so it kind of bungee jumped bungeed me down onto the ground quite safely oh my god no glider I just swung down under these cables and oh actually I did take the tip of my glove off because I kind of
flashed past the concrete post and it just took it broke my broke my fingernail so that was it I broke my fingernail which wasn't bad really Steve where was that? it was currently actually that was in Coronet Solo in Italy was that the one that Belcourt threw you? it's a place this
sounds really familiar was that the one that Belcourt threw his reserve and then got pasted on the fence?
may well have been lots of people my wife she was spiraling she was probably 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 another Scottish woman loads of people were slapping into the ground luckily a lot of boggy ground around the lakes there and it was people would have thought it may have been Bill did that yeah I think it was because it sounds exactly like that
it was he was he was real low and you know just getting smacked all over the place in the gust front and you know 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 imagine like a chain link fence so it just basically sucked him up into the fence and he and he it was blowing so hard that it ended up just breaking the fence over you know he was just kind of pasted against this thing and I guess there were some Italians out I don't know on their porch looking on with interest and it's quite a funny story
it was kind of it was remarkable that nobody was seriously hurt well nobody was hurt you know 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 hey that was nothing compared to what could have happened and of course then 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 yeah
you're not invincible you know take it easy and don't you know fly something within your capabilities
which I am doing now we we haven't you know it's all still
there's I mean and I was on I was on the rescue but we still they have a 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 the real takeaway for for me and this this actually came from from Josh Cohn and he's always very thoughtful about these kind of things but it was just a very good reminder of the fact that we and our gear have limits and we need to be aware of them and and not we don't know yet the the gear side of of Kiwis but it's you know what I do know is that you know 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 in 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 and the Owens you know 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 just got his book published and you know there's probably just a lot of things going on in his life where you know maybe sometimes it's okay for flying to be a distraction but not always
you know he was he was was it 55 you know I think most you've got to appreciate as you get your reflexes are no longer what they were as you get older and you know I certainly I know you know I plateaued years ago and I think I'm going down in skills really and I certainly know that my I'm certainly not as brave as I was and I'm for that reason I'm not prepared to try and fly things which are beyond my capability 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 the weather can change or you you might get low in a place you didn't expect to be low where the landings aren't so good so you know we're often 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 to put things you know stack the odds in your favour by flying you know with the right equipment getting the right skill set you know doing SIVs all those things that you need to do which can be a little bit time constraints and finance but you know it is it is an extraordinarily dangerous sport that we do and it's very fulfilling very enjoyable but you know it's you've got to be it's the consequences of making just a humdrum mistake when you're having a bad day can be you know long lasting very very painful or fatal
that's a great place to end I think Steve and some very good advice there at the end but thank you for sharing all that you were kind of rolling on some stories there I think we need to tap back into some more of those at some point those are those are terrific but thanks for sharing the you know the 2011 comp I don't know that everybody's you know heard the full story there so it was great 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
well thank you thank you for having me
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cool um yeah i just noticed we're at 90 minutes in so i wanted to but that that was a really good spot to end although we don't need to end if you have any 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 that was some really good that was a great yeah it was a great natural end
no i think we've covered um hey we've covered a lot we've been i think an hour and a half or so we've been at it i think so yeah that's um fine by me yeah cool
how did how did you how did that accident go what happened
oh it was so it was um you know 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 um it was a day when uh all the gliders all my clients had just landed and it was it was becoming stormy and i thought well rather than land or land in my own house and go have a coffee you know see the dogs and um um i just set up to go into this field i've flown into hundreds of times you
know little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little So I had to recover and let the thing dive. But by then I kind of dived into an area, which is, you know, my house is sort of out in the boonies, but there's some other houses nearby. And I was sort of flying over someone's house with cables and things. And I got near the road and I was sort of boxing by cables. So I had to sort of, rather than hit the cable, maybe a neck height,
I just had to force stall the glider, you know, over the road, about 10 meters or something like that. And
so I just
force-sorted down onto concrete, which was, you know, I had to hold it so it wouldn't spin. And I had my hands down and I went in heavily. And I just, my body collapsed. And I kind of had my hands down to stop it spinning around, I 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 inter-octial membrane, which is the bit which, the membrane which goes between the cubital and the radius. And that never heals. So I lost the rotation in the arm there. And I'd already, that's the arm, same arm I crashed on the hang glider back in the day. And also I had two other accidents on skateboarding when I was a kid. And so that arm had been just taking the pounding over the years. And I took some tendons out on the shoulder.
So, yeah, 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, you know, only went away, that went away a couple of years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's still shit. But it was just one of those accidents, an embarrassing accident. You know, nothing heroic about it. You know, it was one of those ones which you wouldn't, it was like, it was like, you know, I always think I'd hate to die coastal soaring. You know, that would be embarrassing. It's like one of those accidents where, Christ, you know, trying to land on a reasonably okay day near your house, cock it up because you're tips to pull with a glider. And, yeah. But, yeah, it was a hard one.
And, you know, it was kind of on top of all that emotional shit I had from the world. And, yeah, it wasn't a good place for quite a few years, really. But luckily, I was still able to fly. You know, the next season, you know, I had, it was painful. At least flying, you know, I was able to fly and able to still work. And so it could have been worse. Does your wife still fly? I thought at the time. She does, but not very much now. She, yeah. She was a Spanish champion about 98, I think it was. But she had a cancer diagnosis about three, four years ago. So that was a big setback for her. And, of course, also, we've got kids in their teens. And, of course, once the kids came through, you know, then she was pretty much stopped.
She started again. She's done a few flights this year, you know, just evening stuff. Very gentle. But she hasn't got the fire. She used to be really keen, but, you know.
She's managed to keep her habit. And I say she's got off the, unfortunately, I'm still a little bit hooked up on the drug. But, you know, not so much as I was. But obviously you are as well. Well, you've got a different sort of, you're very much an extreme. Are you going to be doing, is there going to be an X-Alps next year?
Yeah, yeah. Are you going to try for that? I've signed up for one more. I really didn't think I was going to after the last race. You know, the 2015 and the 2017, I mean, I was already thinking about the next one during the race. You know, it was just like, God, 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 waypoints. 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 train. 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 Gushelbauer. I'm not tall and lanky and like a marathon runner. You know, I'm kind of like a wombat. And I'm older and I've got terrible. You know, but I, I can, I can maintain very good speed, but it was, let me get the point. The point was like in 2019, I, I basically had 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'd kind of figured it out and yet it was still just, just kind of middle of the pack. You know, I placed 12th and back in 2015, it was, it was eighth.
And that. I guess that gave me this like false hope that, oh, well, you know, if I work really hard at this, I can, you know, so anyway, I got wrapped up in the numbers rather than just the awesomeness of it because it is just awesome. Um, but I, it was, the reality was just like, God, I, 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, um. So anyway, I, I wasn't as excited coming out of this one to, 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 cause the T my team that those they're really excited to do it again. It is, it is just really fun.
So I'm trying to figure out, you know, how to separate more from like attainment and more just, uh, just the process. And so in, 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, you know, I'm trying to have that not be near nearly as important, I guess is what I'm saying. So, you know, I'll still train really hard and I think we'll still 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 sure. No, I'm not. Then. Not very confident Americans are going to be able to even travel over there by then, but we'll see.
Um, you know, hopefully.
But it's just such a remarkable thing in, uh, you know, for me as a, you know, it's a shame it has, it's like one of the ultimate sporting events and which you can do, I think, you know, in, in, but it hasn't got the media interest as it really, just like many things, you know, a paragliding on the whole. Yeah. Um, people don't appreciate it. You know, that is such a fantastic adventure. This whole thing is, I mean, what they are doing a lot better as far as sponsorship than most events, but, um, it's, you know, if you compare it to like motor car racing, which is so tedious and it's got all that exposure, then you've got this real, real adventure, you know, with like the complex, these tactics, you know, spectacle and nobody's interested.
You know? Yeah. And
risk and all these things. I mean, you know, when you think about just like ultra thons, I always describe it to people like, well, think, think ultra thon 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, that's the thing. It's just, it's not relatable. It's not golf. You know, people can't relate to it, I guess.
But, but it is, you know, I can't remember what your, your, your question was. Oh, I mean. I'm definitely, you know, so I, I just, I have a little girl, she's three. And, you know, I, 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 49 in this next one. And you do start to have a much different approach to risk. And, you know, I, I think that that will hopefully that will kind of evaporate during the race. Cause you, you get in these weird mind where you just, you become very strong in your mind and during the race and, you know, you've trained for it and you just start really believing in yourself.
And, um, I, you, I, you, you fly in conditions that I think typically would be pretty nerve wracking and you just got it. And I, and I don't, I don't know. I'm not even saying, I don't even think they're more. More dangerous. It's just because you really are in the right head space for it. Um, but you know, like your, your, your story of doing the fly on the wall landing, you, you get, you get in this head space where you're not going to screw it up. And, um, but at the same time, it's like, yeah, but it's still, it is wicked dangerous. And so I, I, I don't know that I 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 old. But certainly that my daughter having my daughter is, is spotlighted it more for me.
I don't really want to come home now these days. And I think, you know, that does, you're just not something, like you said, it's not something you're thinking about when you're 20.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a, it's, there's a lot of risk of that exit. Cause you're, you're, I mean, that's what we didn't speak about it in the talk, but you know, that as a competition pilot. Yeah. Once or as a meet their action, you've got to understand that people's, uh, acceptance of risks while they're the way they fly changes dramatically when they're put under, uh, in a competition environment. You know, they would, they start taking these insane risks, which they would not normally take. And of course, and for what reason, because, you know, there's no big prize money. There's no, there's any 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? Yeah. Well, you asked that to competition pilots in the event, and there's a lot of head scratching.
And, uh, so you say, Christ, you know, why do they think that it's worth taking a risk? Because they, you know, they're not going to be remembered. In fact, they might be remembered for a few weeks if they kill themselves during the event. But, you know, taking a risk to win these competitions is, is not worth it, but people do. And, uh, and it's just the way that humans are made. You know, you put them in a competition environment and then people push themselves a little bit more than they should. So, um, so that's, um, that's kind of been programmed. So, uh.
Yeah. That's a good one. That would have been a good one. Let's talk about that. Although we are now I'm still recording so we can, we can maybe throw that in. That's an interesting one. Isn't it? Because it's, it's a real, uh, we, you know, we've all heard that a bunch of times. Like, Hey, there's, there's no, there's not, there's not even glory, let alone money. You know, literally, like you said, you know, most people will, most people in the sport have no idea. Who won the world's last year. And, uh, and no one cares. And so you, yeah, you have this real problem with ego. Cause it does, it does really happen, you know, in, in, in the, in the X house, it happens all the time. And that's, I think a different driver for sure. A lot of that's just, you know, the lack of wanting to walk more.
And I mean, it's, there's a lot of things that really do make you do silly stuff over and over again. But like I said, it's. I mean, this I'm toying with saying something really stupid and dangerous here, but there haven't been, there's been a lot of accidents in the X house, but there hasn't been the ultimate accident there. And I think that's just because the, you know, you, you do, like I said, you, you know, you do train a lot for us. So the people are naturally resilient, you know, they're, they're able to bounce better. And, but you just, you just get in this funny frame of mind that I very often can't get in when I'm just normally flying. And, uh, and I think when we go to competition. We're offloading even more responsibility. You know, we're not even paying attention to the weather. We're just, I think we're often at really then flying on ego and, and desire for the podium or something that is really not why we should be doing it.
Yeah. Well, there's a lot, there's a lot of herd instinct as well, isn't there? Where people are flying. You have to be very, very careful with the task design. Cause I think anyone's just thrown a few cards.
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anywhere on the 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 realize 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 on and thinking, I've done it in a company. I remember flying in with Mike Watts at this event where we did have a fatality. It was a really windy day when the mistral was blowing in France. It was Saint-André, but we went to Saint-Vuissant, which is a place where you can fly just about, and there's a little magic bubble there, which is not so windy. But they set the task further down the Dormus range out of the magic bubble.
And I was flying along recently up at the front with Mike Watts, and I thought, okay, well, that doesn't matter. 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 then we got there, and Mike went in. I thought, oh, shit. Okay, we'll all go in. And we ended up having to land in an unpleasant 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 shit task. Very, very bad task setting. And, of course, if we'd have had a normal, sensible, if we'd have 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 then fantastic.
Maybe in the XL because you're not constrained by too many turn points. And you are flying more on your own. And you have to sort of make – you probably have to make a lot more decisions on your own rather than just following the herd. Then perhaps it is safer. Yeah, I think so. There's a competition for it.
Yeah, and you have this – yeah, you do have more of a longevity approach to it all. It's all – you know, you – you're never thinking about Monaco during the race. You're just thinking about the next move, the next move, the next move. And I think it is about – you know, you recognize if you wreck yourself or, you know, even just roll an ankle, your race is over. You know, so I think there is a – there is a bit of – there is a bit more of a preservation side of it. But then 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. You know? And now, you know, I really have felt like I haven't done anything that risky during the race. 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 know, you've trained for it. You've got that move. But it's not really that reasonable. You know what I mean? 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. Well, it's the X-Ops. 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 balled up my wing and packed it and kept going. And it didn't even slow me down. It was – you know, whereas usually that'd be kind of a high – it'd be a high adrenaline event just landing in the trees.
It was just funny. Yeah. You just – you'd get in a weird – you know, very cool. It's – 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, very intense drug for 12 days. You know, 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-Ops is like a – you know, you're – it's a springboard into that state. And then you just get to stay there the whole time.
And going on to that risk taking, there's a perfect example. That world championships in Sierra Nevada, in Granada 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 blowing around 78 decays an hour, just 500 meters above the tops. And we were up on the sea station. And – it was just awfully windy. And the cast was going to be canceled. But the Spanish, they thought they'd have a bit of fun. Because – so they went ahead and said – and they started doing the briefing, all right, and saying, okay, these are the conditions. You know, we just want you all to stay, you know, just try and stay low today. You know, it shouldn't be too turbulent, of course.
And we don't want you to go to the valleys because it's blowing 100 kilometers an hour in the valleys. And they did it just a straight-faced task.
And, of course, there were some people going, these Spanish guys are crazy, trying to kill us. But they were all – they were taking their notes. And then I think one of the Swiss guys got up and said, this is disgusting. You can't do this. But the Spanish – the meat director – it was a joke, you know, but they just carried on through it and said, you'll be okay, you know. And people were getting really angry, you know, really uptight. And, of course, they should be because, you know, it was launchable, the launch there, because we're in the Lee. But it was blurt – it was Howling Gale just above. But, you know, those people, you know, it was a joke. And everyone thought, well, we might die doing this. But that was the task. And the guys started getting their gear ready. You know what I mean?
And, of course, then they didn't know. We're only joking. It goes, ah-ha, very funny. But, you know, that was an illustration of the fact that, you know, people are – they think – People will do it. This is extraordinarily dangerous. This is beyond anyone's capabilities. But, oh, okay, well, other people will do it. I better get ready as well. And, yeah, 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 when all this COVID is behind us and we put this awful year in our rear view mirror 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. Well, hopefully you're recovering very quickly from your COVID experience. And I wish you well.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. I've had big deals.
Cheers, bud. Talk to you soon.
Okay. All right.
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