Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. Let's see, a little bit of housekeeping. Got some comps coming up. Registration for the Niviuk now. We've renamed it the Niviuk Red Rocks Wide Open, which is in September, the last week of September. In Utah, opens April 2nd. And the Niviuk X-Lost, which is my smaller hike and fly comp that happens here in my backyard over in the Lost Rivers. That is the end of May. That registration is open now. And the Global Rescue X-Red Rocks. So, I'm putting all these things out on my own thing. But the Global Rescue X-Red Rocks, which is right after the Wide Open, which is a four-day hike and fly race. Works like a stage race.
Also in Utah. And late September, early October, that is also open for registration. So, find all those. Find out about those on my website, cloudbasemayhem.com. Or go directly to those or just search them. X-Red Rocks, X-Lost, and the Red Rocks Wide Open. Love to have you there. It's a special part of the world. And really fun places to compete and throw down in very, very wild country. My guest today is, she's a wild one herself, Violeta Jimenez. She's up in Seattle. She has, in the last few years, become one of our very best pilots in the U.S. Across the board. Just in the overall, she's always consistent.
She's always at the top. I was fortunate to fly in her first World Cup back in 2021 in Aksaray in Turkey. So, I was there to witness that. She was on a Xeno back then. And she's just been flying lights out since. And so, she's part of the U.S. women's team. And I've had her on before. But she's really just an awesome pilot and an awesome competitor. And she has been through the ringer. She has chased this really, really very hard. Certainly, in the beginning of her career, I think she would say, she would agree with maybe too hard. But has had a number of incidents, reserves and tree landings and also accidents.
And she takes us through some of those in this podcast. And so, I wanted to dive in to, you know, what keeps her going and fear injuries. And how she's been able to just make these comebacks and stick with it. Her passion is extraordinary for this sport. And she's also been really involved in the, everything going on right now with civil and the safety debate. And some of the things that just passed at the plenary last week were not very welcomed by lots and lots of folks. Including the ballast limits, which are back as of right now. In category one. So, she talks about the consequences of that. And how that happened.
And, you know, the vitriol that has come out of that. So, yeah, civil's been in the flashpoint of a very heated debate now for months. Since the accident at the Worlds. And things continue there. So, we talk a little bit about that. And just how that is affecting, certainly, or could affect the smaller people in the sport. And try. And try to make this thing safer. You know, can we do it? Should we do it? And if so, how? And some of the unintended consequences if we do. But really fun talk with lots of good stuff about risk. And passion. And comps.
And strategies. And safety. And lots of good stuff. You will enjoy it. I guarantee it. Cheers.
Cheers. We have been dying to do this literally for years. And I think the timing of this one is about perfect. We could probably revisit every year from here on out and do more of these. But you and I have known each other for a very long time. And we've been part of this very dynamic community together for a long time. And I have seen you kind of, I guess I would call it, come up through the ranks. And represent us at the Worlds. And just. Just dominate in the women's. And very consistently top ten overall. You're one of the most consistent pilots, I think, on the world circuit. And I was happily there with you at your first World Cup in Turkey.
And Axaray in 2021, which is actually still, I think, my best World Cup that I've ever had. So that was meaningful to me. And a lot of fun. And a very cool place to fly. But I think that's a great place. For us to start. Because in a sense, it's kind of in the middle of your career. You were just getting going with World Cups. That was your first one. At that point, you'd already been through a lot. And we're going to talk about that. And I want to let you just lead that off. So get us up to 21 in Turkey. You know, encapsulate that part of your flying life. And then when we get to the end of that, we'll take it from 21 up to current. And the things that have happened there, including the worlds in Brazil, which is, you know, kind of been the flashpoint for this whole civil and safety debate.
And the plenary that just happened. You had a terrible accident there. So we got a lot to talk about. But why don't we take it from Turkey and then kind of rewind the clock?
That sounds great. So, yes, Turkey back in 2021 was my first World Cup. I still remember it very fondly. And, you know, it's interesting. That was, I think, where a lot of Americans started getting into World Cups who had not been before. I was one of them. This was after COVID. I think everybody was kind of jazzed to travel and get out there. And for me, as you said, I'd been through some stuff. So at the end of 2020, I had a very bad accident flying cross country in Mexico. That was a weather related thing where, you know, the wind picked up quite a lot. And I ended up taking a collapse close to the ground while I was trying to land. So I've written about that in cross country as well as like on my personal Instagram. So I won't drain the details of that necessarily, except to say, you know, that I was hospitalized for quite a while and I couldn't walk for a few months, went through rehab, all of that.
And so I've written about, you know, how after that accident, I was still I still really wanted to fly. But I had to think really seriously about how would I reengage with this? Sport that I loved so much. And that accident came, you know, it wasn't the first time something had gone wrong in my flying. I'd thrown some reserves in competition. Like when I started on a two liner, I really didn't have a lot of education about how to deal with the two liner. And so I, I had to throw a few times that that wasn't really fun. And so all of this kind of wrapped up into, you know, me deciding after my big accident. In 2020, that I wanted to do things differently, I didn't want to reengage with the sport in the same way that I had.
And one of the things that I ended up concluding, actually, was that competition was a venue in which I would have different margins of safety than than I had given myself in the past. That's it. That is an interesting statement to some people, because some people perceive competition to be more dangerous than free flying. I completely disagree. So, yeah. I, I, and it depends on how you do it, of course, there's always, you know, relativism based on who you are and how you fly. But to me, if you fly a big cross country flight, you're on your own, the weather is changing, maybe you have people near you, maybe you don't, maybe you're flying in a remote place, maybe you're not. If something goes wrong, who will see, who will respond?
How long will it take? How easily is it to get out? How easy is it to get to medical care? Now, as you mentioned, the Worlds in 2025, there was, that was a flashpoint where we debated some of these things in the context of competitions. But for me, in 2021, when I was making the decision to engage more strongly with comps, I was like, hey, if I'm flying in a competition, somebody's put a tracker on me. Somebody's following me. There's a whole group of other people who are making decisions about whether it's safe to fly. Who are watching the world. Who are watching the weather. Who are extremely interested in whether they can continue safely along the course that we've set. Also, the course is set with attention to what the weather looks like.
Because we want to fly a valid day. So, you're not going to set, if it's a good, if it's a well-organized competition, you're not going to set some wild, crazy course line that is likely that we can't fly the whole way. So, instead, you'll set something more reasonable. So, that decision to engage more in competition actually came from a place of, I don't know. I think this is, this can be a safer way for me to participate in the sport I love. And there were some other considerations there, too. In 2021, I was flying a small Zeno at that World Cup in Aksarai. And that, as I was flying more and more competitions, that's when I could no longer ignore the fact that I was a small person in a sport that optimizes size.
And so, I started to think about. What do I have to do in order to be able to compete better with the rest of the competition? And so, in 2022 is when I stepped up from a small Zeno to a medium small Zeno. And then later to a small Enzo. And it's interesting. We can talk more about ballast later. I might be one of the few people who's actually flown every size from 90 kg top to 115 kg top. And so, I intimately know the differences in those gliders. And there are safety considerations there, too, of course. But I think that gives us a little bit of a start.
Yeah. And I mean, you're tapping into something that maybe let's get into later. But the big part of this debate is just watching it from the sidelines and then digging into it in various places because there has been a lot, especially going into the plenary that just happened. But all the discourse going on base camp and many, many, many good intentions. But there's all this thing that, A, competitions are more dangerous than free flying. How do we know that? Do we know that? We don't know that. We have no data about this kind of stuff. This is not F1 where we're tracking every little single thing. And I don't know if this is a number that I have put out there a few times because I got it from Cross Country Magazine. And I did some research and I couldn't find this.
So, this is, again, data that it could be complete bullshit. But in Switzerland last year, there were something like plus over 30 deaths.
I think maybe one or two. Again, these numbers just take them a grain of salt. We're in competitions. It's just a dangerous sport, period. So, like you said, I think many people would hear, oh, wait a minute, she's saying competitions are safer. No, we've always heard the other way. We actually don't know. We know that competitions, you know, people push harder. Competition in general in every sport is going to have more accidents than just. Than non-competing because the numbers of people that we push and we're trying to get results, these kind of things. So, it makes sense. Maybe it's true, but we don't actually know, do we? It's crazy how little we know. We all have these opinions. You know, goal, this whole thing with end of speed and the conical ESS and that kind of thing.
I've personally never seen an accident goal. I've been doing this for a very, very, very long time. I think you're absolutely right, Gavin. Is it more dangerous? I don't know. You know.
Yeah, I think what we're seeing, you know, with this flashpoint of the worlds in 2025 is a lot of personal biases and ideas playing out as though they're fact. And unfortunately, our governing body supports the promulgation of these personal biases and ideas because we don't have, we don't as a sport, you know, commission studies on this. There have been a few studies on paragliding, but not many, not a lot. And so with, you know, the example of Switzerland, and I don't have in my mind the numbers of tragedies that occurred last year. But as you know, Gavin, in my professional life, I work in data science and actually specifically I work with risk. So I, AI risk, but I help people think about how to measure risk and how to measure what is dangerous for them.
It's in a very different context in the professional world, obviously, than in the sports world. But still, in order to understand those tragedies in Switzerland or anywhere else, you'd have to actually do a good analysis. So you'd have to look at, okay, how many people were participating in competitions? How many people were participating in other types of flight? Can we control for other factors like age, like weather, that sort of thing? Like, you know, there's all of that would have to be done. And so you're right that we don't actually know whether competition is safer or not. We don't have any data on it. We all have personal biases, myself included. You know, I have good reasons, as I said, for making my choices.
Also, you know, you and I are different people. So it could be that comps are more dangerous for Gavin, but they're not more dangerous for Violetta. You know, that's just, you know, something we have to accept. And, of course, competition, yes, it can cause people to push harder. It can cause, you know, people don't want to be the guy to call level whatever on the radio. They don't want to see it. They don't want to say it's level three because maybe somebody is going to think they're a coward. Or maybe their team won't get to goal or they won't get to goal or their buddy is going to beat them. All kinds of biases can play out there. But I'm here to tell you those biases are there, too, outside of competition. So the accident I referred to in Mexico in 2020, I was flying with a group of my friends. I got a bad feeling, and I didn't say anything. So I feel like those pressures exist in all types of flying.
You have to be aware of them, and you have to think about how you're going to mitigate them.
So you had this, and it was a bad physical accident, the one in Mexico. It was a hell of a comeback, like you said. It took months, a lot of rehab, learned how to walk again. You know, it was a life flight, I guess, back. I don't know what you call that from Mexico. But, you know, it was a big deal. And you said you'd had others before that. You had them way early in your career. You had the hike and fly accident. And Mitch's deal in California, I think you broke your leg, right?
I tore an ACL, and I broke my back. The back wasn't so bad, but the ACL needed surgery.
Let's go back even further, then, because your background, as I understand it, was in ultras. So you've been an athlete your entire life. What do you think it was particularly about this sport and your approach that came from, I mean, that's not, I don't, you know, Will Gadd always talks about it, that, you know, gravity sports, flow sports are ones that he feels when people come from those kind of sports, it's an easier transition. It's a more logical transition as opposed to climbing, weightlifting, or ultras, that kind of thing. But, you know, back in your early career, when you came here, I remember when you were dating Mitch and you came here to Sun Valley, you know, we were all looking at your lines at the end of the day going, holy shit, she's bold, you know?
I mean, you were a new pilot. Just sending these deep lines. And, you know, we were all pretty worried about you. And, you know, and you had these, and then you had an accident or an incident, like you said, reserves and that kind of thing. And, you know, there were a lot of us that were pretty worried about you. And, you know, but you've, yeah, so let's take it from your background and getting into it and just your hunger for this. Because, you know, there haven't been many people I've been around in my career. That have had so much hunger and desire.
Yeah. And I think, yeah, you bring up a number of interesting points. So I came from ultra running and I was a dancer when I was younger, ballet. And so one of the things that got me into flying was I had just never considered, I didn't even know it was a possibility. I grew up in New York City. I didn't see people flying. I was like peripherally aware that hang gliders existed. But I had never, like, you know, a lot of people have this story. Like, oh, I would watch birds and I'd want to be a bird. Like, that was so far from my conception of what was possible that it just never occurred to me. And so when I was introduced to it, which was, you know, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia at the time. Not a mecca of free flight, exactly. No.
I saw it and I was like, this exists, first of all. And I just graduated from my master's program. So I guess I was feeling like, all right, what comes next? What comes next in my life? And I'd been doing ultramarathons for years. I was really into that. And the idea of being able to take this machine and travel around the world and see the mountains that I ran on from the air, I was like, this is incredible. Like, I want to do this. And so that was where it started. Now, you know, rewinding the clock to me almost 12 years ago now. I had no idea that it would take me. Where it has. Like, I just didn't. I didn't have context on the sport.
So I don't think I at that point could have imagined, like, how deep the well goes. But as I moved forward with it, it kind of became clear to me as it becomes clear to a lot of people that if you want to pursue this in a way that seems reasonable or even if I wanted to pursue it in a way that honored the dream I had when I began. You kind of have to go deep. And deep means different things for different people. But my dream was to see things from above and not be terrified, you know, to explore and be able to feel like I was doing that in a way that was reasonable. And so I think I started to accelerate on that, on that path. So when I was in Sun Valley with you guys, you know, I was on my little sea wing.
You guys were all, you know, flying Ds and CCCs. And there was no way I could keep up with you. But I was like, well, this is a goal. This is a golden opportunity for me to do what I want to do. Maybe I have to be alone, but I can do it. And so that was, I think, that year was an inflection point for me where I was like, I see a path. I see a path to get to do the things that I want to do, to be able to explore and to take this around the world more than I have. And so I think that's what we were seeing there. Then after that is when I switched to a two-liner. And as I said, there was a learning curve there for me that took a little while to resolve. So I went from feeling very, very comfortable with my little sea wing to being on a D wing that acted differently.
And it took a while for me to figure that out. I think there's a little bit more knowledge in our community now about how to fly two-liners. And certainly, of course, you know, now six, eight years later, we have two-liner seas, which are great. You could make that transition with a little bit more ease than I did. The other thing that I think about is, you know, now, again, I've had the experience of flying small two-liners and bigger two-liners. And the small ones are indeed more punishing. They're more difficult. And when something goes wrong with them, it's harder to recover. I don't know. Some of the ways that I would recommend to somebody to move from a three-liner to a two-liner,
I would say, as far as hitting it with a big wing is the easiest way. That's one way that I would say it's more available at that time that I was doing it. But, yeah, there's certainly a better way I probably could have done it. And so the other thing that I wanted to address, Gavin, is you mentioned the difference of coming from a flow sport versus another type of sport. And so, yeah, like I said, I was a runner. I was a dancer. I didn't participate in flow sports. I that wasn't part of my background and so when I came into this you know some of the things that you learn from ultra running are applicable I mean everything has certain things in common but with flying for example there is more skill involved than there is with ultra running so with ultra running there's this weird little there's this weird big part of the game which is you can try harder and make up for a certain amount you can't do that in flying you can't flap you know at a certain point if you don't know what to do in a moment you don't have recourse I mean you can throw your reserve or you know do other things depending what's going wrong but those are you know so those are wildly different sports but on the other hand I absolutely advocate for people coming to flight from wherever they're coming from you know if they feel called to it I think
it would be wonderful if we had more people like Will Gadd educating all of us about risk and what it looks like and if we had a better way to to talk about it and engage with those conversations throughout our flying careers yeah
he articulates it better than anybody and those of you listening please follow him on whatever platform you dig because his posts are awesome they're
awesome he's one of the people that I recommend to everybody talking
about risk too I mean he's just very very good at it and understanding it and seeing the glass less than half full you know he's he's looking for what's going to break the fucking glass that's what he likes to say you know yeah not be so optimistic all the time is is his approach which has served him well well why why the gravitation that you you know you've had this I mean you can send it like anybody and and I know you're very passionate about just flying big lines and you know you've had this you know you've had this you know you've had this you know you're very passionate about just flying big lines always have been from the beginning but why the passion for specifically racing and and high-end racing I mean you're like you said you've been through an awful lot I mean there must be you know there must be conversations at your house with your family and them going what are you doing I mean don't put us through this again you know you've been through an awful lot somebody once told me that you know she'd die for points that's
not true I know I know it's not true but
you know but you have you you really have I mean right from that one in Turkey you you you gravitated immediately towards World Cups you you held on tight you have held on tight and as an American participating in this you know this is all self done you know you're self-funding it it's your own time there's we don't have any backup you know we're not the French we don't have anybody helping us through this so you've learned it kind of on your own um I mean obviously our community helps teach us but you know you you have dedicated an enormous amount of time to this why yeah
I think that's that's that's the million dollar question actually and that's a question you have to re-engage with I mean not just if you have an accident or if if something goes wrong but to follow Will's logic you should re-engage with that basically at every point throughout your Yeah Will. flying career when you're considering something big you should ask yourself why am i doing this what is it worth to me because this is a dangerous sport and not just paragliding of course but many adventure sports like you should really be conversant with that you should be conversant with what what the pros are for you and so you know that that could be um you want to win something or you want to send a big line you want to see something but be really clear about that because there's a trade-off potentially that you might be making um and so this is a conversation that i've had with with myself with my friends and family you know several times and i probably will have it many more times as long as i continue flying and there will be a day that i don't fly anymore but i just don't plan for that to be anytime soon so i think as to why comps and why that was interesting it is um
i am passionate about um progression you know if you if you read books on on flow and on um even happiness and how how you gain happiness in your life this gets a little abstract and philosophical but actually being fully engaged in something that you really have to pay attention to that puts you in flow and that that generates happiness for us that's a really good way and so that's that's the intellectual take on it but we've all felt it you know when when you've been really fully in something and you're not thinking about anything else your mind is clear it's blissful to be honest now could i find that state in another place besides comps of course you know there's a million ways that you can get into this you can play piano you can dance you can you know kayak you can whatever um you can do acro but i started feeling it in comps where for me what i love about comps and one of the things that i'm i realized i'm good at is observation and so that total engagement with your environment where you know you're noticing the wind you're noticing the clouds you're noticing the other people that's a big thing in comps don't get outside of it you're noticing how you feel how the wing feels all of that comes together and you make a decision as a result you know and some of those decisions are not conscious once you start getting better at them of course you know you're like go this way and that that i go this way it you might not even be able to really articulate why you went right instead of left maybe if you look back you'd be like it looked a little brighter on that side i felt like there's a little more sun over there or maybe you'd be able to say i saw a bird climbing i saw those two guys climbing these guys were getting a better line than i was maybe there is something but all of that
engagement leads to a really incredible flow state for me where you know and and the thing about a comp is generally you get you get to do that over a few days definitely like comps throw you into this thing where you have to be focused and if you can't be you probably shouldn't be flying one there's that engagement part and then the progression part which again there's research showing like you know being able to progress and get better at something also very satisfying that's the intellectual side emotionally i feel that so when i when i feel i have an opportunity and i to to continue to progress in something that's that's really compelling for me so starting in turkey for example i mean a little bit before then i'd done some national comps before that i was like this is really interesting and i think i see where i'm fucking up you know and and so the idea that you can see it and fix it and then if you do you know and you're like oh yeah i got it okay you know that that becomes very compelling and so of course later that progression slows down enormously and so maybe you're you're you know you're
not going to get quite as much out of but as we said i came from ultra running which you know i used to run for fun through the night like i did 100 mile races so i nobody has ever accused me of not being able to stick with something or you know not being able to keep myself occupied during like 36 of running so the
lack of tenaciousness is not something you're going to get quipped by not
a problem for me so yeah yeah um so i gave you a couple a couple sort of more intellectual examples of what i find compelling about flying but you know this is this is where we get into sort of the art of it and i do like writing about flying because i feel it's the the only way to really describe something is is a little bit more literary in in in a sense i i compare it to you know being in love i compare it to you know having a having a lifelong love or a lifelong passion for something that's that's what this has become for me is is something it's it's something i'm building and i'm building it with other people but really i'm building my own little tower in the woods somewhere it it doesn't entirely matter what other people are doing i'm i'm building the story of my life this is a thread in it a big thread
that's allowed me to grow in a lot of ways that i wouldn't have otherwise you know i i chose a flow sport i chose something i'd never heard of that would be incredibly difficult for me and that that made it compelling if it's easy it's not that interesting is it you know if something comes easy you don't appreciate it but something that comes hard something you have to work for that's that's a little more valuable have
there been doubts
of course yeah and so most recently you know i as as you mentioned i i had an accident at the worlds and we can we can talk more about that but that was a a moment of severe doubt for me where partly in the context of what was happening with the sport i was like do i want to engage with this do i feel good about flying in this way again and i i started flying again in january in mexico which is a place that i love as you know we go to vaia every year for the monarca competition and i i went there even with pretty big doubts about i was like well i like this how will i feel you know and you know just to get back to the question of what keeps me passionate when i was thinking about that gavin i i was like i don't i
bet i'm gonna like flying again i'm gonna make that bet but i know what will feel really great is reengaging with my community so that's also you know something that keeps me coming back in a lot of us we have a pretty pretty special thing in the us so yeah
it is incredibly special and what about doubts more related to to what end i mean what i mean by that is you know you've got a really good chance of becoming world champion if you if you ever run that through your mind do you think like that or do you think more i mean we're all supposed to be thinking about process but you know we do have egos do you think about that and if you did hey would it matter would it change anything would it just mean now i want another one because we have seen the biggest names in our sport especially on the women's side in the last few years they're done they're just they've had enough you know it's it's played out they've been you know merrill best ever done uh laurie best ever done you know they've they've come and gone and men too i did i'm not singling out women it's it's everybody you know it's i i think there's this side of it that there's not even really glory there's no money there's not really glory i mean everybody forgets i mean i don't remember who the world champion was two times ago you know so it's
it's just it's it's so sad that it's so sad that it's so sad that it's so sad that it's so sad yeah also do you have doubts from that side is there enough intrinsic value to these things
so that's why i said a minute ago you know i'm building my own little tower in the woods and i don't expect it to be you know a pyramid that people are going to look at 100 200 years 500 years from now it's just my it's my little tower i'm building my monument to my life and so do i I think about placement? Yes, I do. I'm a very competitive person. So it matters to me when I when I win, or, you know, when I don't win, which is plenty of that, too. But is that is that the driving force? I agree with what you said, it shouldn't be we have to, we have to be enraptured by the process, which is what I described to you the process of progression, the process of being in flow, the process of playing the game. If you don't like that, if you don't love that, then yes, after you, you know, you win a World Cup, or you win World Championship or whatever, then
you, you know, you stand, you stand up there with a little plastic trophy, and you're like, is this it? Is that all? And it would be if that's all you care about, you know, a plastic trophy, a placement that, you know, people will probably not remember, or will conflate with something else. So So I don't think it's healthy to focus on that. It's, it can be very healthy and very I use the word enrapturing to think about your progression as maybe this is this is an artifact of the progression you're going through. This is a side effect of the piece of art, you're making a brick in the tower that you're building to follow my metaphor. And so do I want to win? Yes. Is that the only thing I care about?
No. When I win? Will I stop? No, I haven't so far. Do I think that the way I continue? You know, creating the story of my life and building this, this beautiful thing will change over time? Yes, it will. So it could be over time that I fly less comps, and I focus back on big lines, that that could be a thing that happens. And to be honest, Gavin, right now, will I become world champion, that opportunity has been taken away from me by what happened with the civil plenary. It was also taken away from some of the past world champions. So we just haven't, you know, built Hamstrung, our sport, and we cut a bunch of top competitors off at the knees. And that was owing to the the ballast issue, which we can talk more about.
But so if I was focused only on that, I would be, you know, really disappointed right now, and I am disappointed and I'm angry. But there are other ways for me to engage with the sport. And if a bunch of fools to be kind, well intentioned fools, to be really kind, will prevent me from pursuing my sport in the way that I wanted to, I will find another way. I have never let somebody stop me from continuing with this thing that I love.
Yeah, I mean, my my take is that there's been enough backlash and enough vitriol about this whole thing that I, I don't see this taking place. But But yeah, I mean, it at the moment, it doesn't look good. Let's spend a couple minutes no more on that. Just so people know what we're talking about. There's a lot
of people that
have no idea what we're talking about. So the plenary just happened. This is an annual is annual or every other year? It's an annual thing. Annual thing. Okay, so that just happened. And there were a number of things that got voted on to address safety, which kind of came out of the thing at the world's you know, the death at the world's. But like you said, well intentioned, but yeah, let's give us the summary. Summary. Summary.
Yeah, sure. Sure. So yeah, there was as we said, the world's was a flashpoint, there was a big focus on safety. And there was a lot of pressure on civil, which is our governing body, one of our governing bodies to act to do something to respond. And so unfortunately, because we don't have a lot of data, as we talked about regarding what causes accidents, we picked certain issues, which, in my mind, and in many other people's minds, were the not necessarily the ones we should have focused on. Moreover, the way that those played out at the plenary, we ended up with kind of the worst of all worlds. So I'll just cover a few of them. One was we, I'm saying we again, kindly, because a lot of us disagreed with this, we chose to reintroduce a 33 kilogram bag limit.
This this existed before 2019. And it was abolished because people hated it. And people tried to cheat. Back in my
time, I mean, yeah, I remember those times, it was horrible.
Yeah, nobody, nobody liked it, even even like larger people didn't like it. So for those of you who don't fly comps, 33 kg sounds like a lot. But consider that like a comp glider with a comp harness and two reserves, you're going to sit kind of, you know, somewhere in the 25 to 28 kilogram range, no matter what you do. So the rest of the weight that you have, maybe that extra 10 pounds is everything else you have to carry that could be your drinking water, your instruments, like, you know, any personal things like your wallet, your cell phone, like whatever. And it's actually not it doesn't give you a lot of choice in there. So people really didn't like it. People tried to cheat the system in various ways. I won't rehash history, but this was voted back in. What this does is, you know, there's there's a, again, not to get into it too deeply, but bigger gliders go better, just in general, that's a physical truth related to physics.
And we all know that again, I have maybe one of the few people in the world who's, who's flown gliders, comp gliders from 90 kg top to 115 kg tops. I can tell you, my success in competitions began when I got on a glider that went to 100 kg. If you're below that, you are severely handicapped, you cannot stay with the gaggle, you just can't play the game like that flow state that I love not possible. And so this this 3033 kg ballast limit that was reintroduced came with an exception, you could balance up to 95 kg doesn't help. So, you know, it's, you know, for somebody like me, I carry a lot of ballast, because I want to compete at the at the highest level, basically, that would make that would force me to fly an extra small Enzo, which goes terribly and is actually dangerous, you know, we call it jokingly the acro Enzo, or another extra small comp glider or a small Zeno.
So I could no longer participate in my sport in a way that I was interested in. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, and the same thing is true, you know, for for actually our most recent world champions, Baptiste, Maxime, you know, a lot of the really good French, many women, not all women, and many small men, too, there's, there's a lot of people out there who would be pushed down at least one size, maybe two sizes. So that that, you know, I have worked with civil in the past, I resigned, actually, as a result of this, and I warned them, this is, you're disenfranchising a lot of your pilots, if you pass this ballast rule, it is sexist, because it particularly affects women. And it's racist, because it particularly affects people, smaller bodied people, which tends to be like, Japan,
Korea, etc. Like, there's, of course, not all people are the same size, you have big and small examples from any country. They didn't listen. And I want to address the fact that I'm using these inflammatory words like racist and sexist, I am very careful, with the words I use. And these are true. So you can have good intentions, but you need to face up to the consequences of what your good intentions reap. I mean, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, let's say that. So we ended up with this worst of all worlds situation where we voted down those proposal for using equalizers, which are these sort of pool noodle things you stick on your on your back risers. And they're supposed to equalize the difference between the sizes. So we voted that down, which, to be fair, I, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I agree with that they weren't tested yet.
So it didn't make sense to vote on them yet. So all of this kind of rolled out out of order, for example, we don't have evidence that ballast is causing a lot of a lot more accidents. We don't have evidence that noodles work the way we think that they will.
What we do know is we didn't pass the equalizers, we did pass the ballast limit. And now we just cut the knees off of a bunch of competitors, myself included, from participating in its mandatory at category one competitions. And now we just cut the knees off of a bunch of competitors, myself included, from participating in its mandatory at category one competitions. And recommended for category two. So yeah, that's, that's my too, not for
me. Yeah.
Yeah. And so a lot of catch to is well, probably, like, it's a pain to do away and stuff. So a lot of cats whose will probably not do it. But that's up to them.
Ah, but the I mean, this is big. I mean, this is big for the Europeans for the worlds, you know, for the Pan Am's. It's because a lot of big misial ones. It's it's it's enormous. It's disenfranchising. It was a huge mess. I think most It
was. people
agree with that. Make
your expectations. And
so it'd be possible
to get it on the cap on that pieces.
interesting to see where we go here i i you know i don't it's too early to throw in the cards of course and
and i too hope that you know civil will put a pause the bureau can choose to pause that decision and and wait for a better idea they could choose that it's up to them this was you know coming back to kind of my my personal context it was kind of wrenching like i woke up on international women's day to see this you know my i'd gotten texts from a bunch of people like they passed the ballast limit and i was like what and you know gavin one of the questions that we that i get i started the u.s women's team with some of my good friends here in the u.s and the u.s is way ahead of other countries as far as the number of women that we have competing on the world stage we've got four of us right now who are who are really good enough to be at world cups all the time which is amazing i get questions even you know at the most recent comp i was in at columbia at the british open about what are you guys doing how can we make our program better and my answer to that is i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm not sure usually has to do with culture and you know the culture around like how do you speak to women on launch like how do you encourage what do you encourage women to do um now the answer is structural as well you know what do you put in place what rules and regulations do you put in place acknowledging that women have in general some different constraints and different needs than men that another you know not to hammer this home too far but another thing that was changed at the most recent plenary is women uh there was a proposal some years back from claudia bogakov who's another of those fantastic women pilots who you know is not competing quite as much anymore although she still is this proposal was to require that when you send a team to the worlds one of the scoring members be a woman and this proposal was made specifically to encourage women in competition and to encourage the the governing bodies in each country to have an incentive to help bring women up in in competition so they they chose to change that they were trying to make it more equitable for smaller countries which i don't know if the math works out on that by the way we'll have to see but in the meantime what they did was they made it so the woman on your team does not have to be a scoring member and so now that you know i i'm willing to bet the questions i get a lot about how we can grow our program a lot of that's going to go away because suddenly that incentive is gone and you know if that sounds pessimistic to you i i understand but you know we we tell children often don't pay attention to what people say pay attention to what they do acta non verba and so if you say you care about having women in your sport if you say you care about inclusion and then you show by your actions that you do not do it you do not enable things that would actually allow them to participate and that would allow the sport to grow you don't actually care so that proposal could have been written differently it could have been workshopped if anybody in the room cared about preserving the incentive for women to stay in competition they didn't so i you know i'm a little passionate about this because it it would have been so easy to not screw up so badly but here we are all
right yeah it's kind of like a double hammer wasn't it okay well that was a great articulation of what's going on there i'm going to do an about face here completely changed i want to talk about personal
choice though gavin so do you want to do you want to like pivot to that a little bit so i mean because that kind of follows on this like you know when we think about when we think about ballast and why you would choose to carry so much you know which i don't like it to be clear i don't enjoy carrying that much ballast it's it's a huge relief i i come home and i fly by i can fly glider and i'm like oh wow i can run around launch this is amazing i can with my stuff easily so it's not that i want to do it for some sick twisted you know sense of fun i did ultras but i'm not actually that much of a masochist um but this is a sport in which your personal choice matters your choice about you know we were talking about Will Gadd and his advice on on thinking about risk and mitigating risk and we said you know what what is something worth to you that's that's a choice that you have to make and so if you are going to do something like fly with ballast and and consider taking off or landing with ballast, which is more difficult and potentially more dangerous,
you've got to think about that. There are ways that you can train to make it better, but you've got to think about what that means, and you have to accept, like, okay, I'm okay with this risk or not. And, you know, these are choices we make throughout our flights, not just with ballast, but what wing do we fly? How do we fly? Where do we fly? How do we respond when something goes wrong? An amusing anecdote is, you know, Jenny O 'Neill and I were talking after a task at the British in Roldanillo, and she was describing how, you know, she was flying low over a city, and she was like, oh, I can't do this. I've got to go land. Like, I don't like it. And she was like, I watched Kevin Philippe, who we all know, very bold pilot. She was like, I watched him just blast over the buildings. And she was like, but he flies with a reckless abandon that I just can't match.
And, you know, that's his choice. And we all know Kevin, fantastic pilot. Yeah, reckless is a word people have applied to him before. But yeah, it's beautiful to watch. It's beautiful to watch that. It doesn't mean I have to make the same choices. And it doesn't mean Kevin needs to make the same choices as me. And in competition or XC or whatever you do, like, it comes down to your choices. What are you willing to do? And, you know, there's a great conversation to be had about what a competition organization's responsibility is versus, you know, versus the pilot. But let's be honest, when it comes down to it, you're the pilot in command. If you get hurt, it doesn't matter if somebody says sorry. It's down to you.
Yeah. And that's the main thing that I feel gets lost. And there was a big debate this year about the ex-Alps. That was the same thing. I feel like that's what gets lost in this. And I had a great chat with Chrigel a while back on the podcast. And he talked about that there's, you know, when we have these accidents, it's kind of this wave, right? When you have an accident, everybody wants more safety. Then you got some safety and everybody wants more performance. And it's kind of just bound back and forth, up and down, up and down like a wave. And, you know, we can do a lot of things, say, from a task standpoint. Yeah. We can just send everybody out in the flats and keep them out of the rotor and keep them off the hills. And, you know, who would want to participate in something like that?
It would just kill it. Racing. Done. Some people, yeah, sure. Some people want to do the whole fishbowl around and around and around and around. You know, that's being proposed as one way of competing. And not personally interesting to me. And so, you know, I think we're all drawn to this because of the risk, in a sense, because of the adventure, because we don't know where we're going to end up. I mean, there's a lot of beautiful things because of danger and risk. And you just can't eliminate it without making it. And
if it's not really
boring, you know, then it's a different sport. It's something else entirely. And so I think that's often what gets lost is that, you know, there's a lot of emotion and there's a lot of social media and there's a lot of imprecise words.
Yeah, I completely agree with that. Again, as I said, I'm personally very careful with words. They're one of the, you know, primary ways that I like to try to communicate with people about things. About this sport is through writing, because I can consider really carefully, what am I saying? How do I want to say it, et cetera. And not everybody is so careful. That's okay. But with social media and with these accidents, I mean, I agree with Chrigel in terms of, like, with many sports, there's, you know, sort of a sine wave, a pendulum. You swing one way, you go back the other way. And there are some things that, you know, probably an organization can do and should do to make things a little bit better. Like one. One of the things that CIVIL did pass at the plenary was a requirement for better medical personnel, which I felt strongly about since, you know, I could have lost my foot at, you know, in Brazil at the Worlds if there hadn't been some doctors brought by the French and the German team who helped out.
So I think, you know, controlling what you can, having some good medical personnel on launch and landing, fantastic idea. You know, that's a reasonable thing to add to a big international competition. Hard to add that level of care to every competition. But, you know, so there are some things there, and then, you know, honestly, the position I resigned from at CIVIL was a pilot, it was called a pilot relations officer. It was, it was created in the fall after the Worlds. They asked, you know, would you help us communicate better with pilots? Which I was like, you really need to do better with this. I would, I'm happy to help. It's just, I need to be able to stand behind their decisions. And I could not after, you know, the events of the last couple of weeks, but yeah, like some of the, some of the way that you communicate right now, we, we have secret voting.
So there's no record of how each country delegate voted for each proposition. And I got to say, Gavin, like, you know, maybe I'm very American about this, but if you have secret voting, you are rarely on the side of the angels. So,
that's not very democratic, is it? Not very democratic. Yeah. Some interesting things happening and yeah. I'm glad you're fine. I'm fired up about this. People got to stay fired up and hopefully there'll be some better resolutions. They won't be perfect. We know that, but hopefully things will get better. We're, we're buttoned up against my time frame for having to end. But before we do, I really want to switch gears here for a moment because you and I had a great talk in Valle. It was this year after your bad accident in Mexico. You said that was 2020?
Yes. So that would have been 2022 at the Monarca. Yeah.
So this must've been 21, maybe, or maybe even 22, but you, a common thing we talk about on the podcast is fear injuries. Many people in the sport have had them either emotional or from a physical accident. I just did a great show with Serena about, you know, her, her accident and you had some great tasking you to come up with the, the, your memory of that. But. But because of that accident, you went through some fear injury stuff, which I was surprised, I didn't know you had, tell me what, tell us what you, what you learned, what you had to go through, what that process.
Yeah. So I think when you have an accident, the assumption should probably be that there's going to be some kind of impact on you. It helps. And you've talked about this in the past, Gavin, if you understand what happened, if you don't understand what happened, then, you know, it's. It's this terrifying black box that you can't open, but assume there's a monster in the box and open the box is, is sort of my advice there. So the way I opened that box, I mean, I, I had a lot of time to think while I was laid up. I thought about what went wrong. I thought about what I could have done differently. And I also, you know, I sought help there's there are psychologists who deal specifically with PTSD and there are some really great methodologies that they can use.
Yeah. To help you identify and mitigate some of the things that, you know, might still be preying on you after an accident like EMDR. So that's, classically that's been like using light therapy to, basically you'll, you'll talk through what happened with, with this, you know, light therapy and, the research shows that actually the, the reported impact of the event will start going down as you talk through it with this, bilateral simulation, you can do. and you, you can do with tapping, which is, I was doing this after COVID. So I was, I was remote with, the person I worked with, and, they'll, have you like, tap like this or on your knees or something like that. cause they can't put a headset on you. And that also works, really interesting research about that.
They think it's, you know, there's something about like in our, our past as, you know, being able, it gives you the sense that you're going away from the danger you're fleeing from the danger. Psych like, you know, psychologically in your lizard brain. I'm not a psychologist. Okay. but there's, there's some really interesting studies if you're interested in learning more about that. But in my experience, it worked for me. Did it work right away? Is it like a 30 minutes and you're done? No, don't expect that. But I mean, there's a value to just talking about what happened and kind of teasing out like what parts were actually the worst for you. Because when you think of an accident, there's a lot of shitty stuff there. Like what ends up sitting in your mind could be the moment that you didn't make the right choice.
It could be the moment that you fell out of the air. It could be the moment that you hit the ground. It could be when, you know, you, you realized there was something wrong with your leg. It could be being in the hospital. So, you know, that's obviously a kind of a distressing thing to think about. But again, the monster will stay in the box and the box will stay in your mind and that monster will come out at the times you don't want it to. If you don't deal with this. So just talking about that with somebody who's a professional, who's not, who's objective and not involved with your life is great. But we also live in a world where there's a lot of great research on PTSD and things like bilateral stimulation can really help. So that was, you know, that is something I would recommend to everybody.
If you, if you have a fear injury, you're dealing with an accident, seek out somebody who can help walk you through it and help you, you know, move on from it. That deals with like that, you know, chest pounding fear that you might get when you go back to launch and you hear the wind. For me, it was hearing wind. That was one thing that for years, still to a little extent, I get it today. There are certain helmets I can't wear anymore because they're noisy. And it just like, it drives my brain crazy. It sounds to me like, like demons, to be frank. It sounds like something's about to go wrong. So identifying that trigger was really important for me. But, but enabling, yourself to reengage with the sport and knowing where you might have a problem. That's really critical.
But the larger questions about how you want to reengage with your sport are also really, really important. And like I said, I've asked them a number of times throughout my flying career. Most recently, after this accident in Brazil, like, did I did I really want to go back to this mess of a competition arena? Where, you know, it
wasn't clear that I was welcome, A, or B, you know, was I going to be able to go back and have some confidence that I would not have to have another accident again? And of course, that's something that I'm not entirely resolved on yet. And as Will Gadd would say, you can never assume that you're not going to have an accident again, you have to accept that could happen. It doesn't matter how good you are. It just could. What happened in Brazil, to touch on it very briefly, you know, I, I, I took a tumble on launch, and I hit a tree stump with my foot. So I have the video of it. There are a bunch of people there. I think the causes there was that launch is really short, and the air does a little rotary thing, it's almost cliffy.
And so I was not the only person who took a tumble. Like there's a great video of Nick Greece, for example, my teammate, you know, he's like charging for it, and his wings just like, you know, right before I took off somebody else, you know, another pilot from Austria did the same thing. Just didn't hit a tree, fortunately. So, so some structural, the launch, that was a factor. Some luck, I had a tree, other people didn't me versus tree was never going to go well. And then, you know, I'm, I also I take some responsibility for it, too. You got you have to, could I have done things differently? Could I have tried to abort sooner? Yeah, maybe I could have. And that's something that I will continue to balance an
issue. And that one? Because you're carrying so much weight?
Yeah, so so actually, for that one, I'd taken off a bunch of ballast because the day looked like shit to me. So I wasn't even carrying what I usually do, like I'd taken off about 10 pounds. So it could have been certainly with ballast you, you know, you have more difficulty aborting. And yeah, I mean, basically, I'm like a freight train. Like, once I get going, I can keep going. But it's it's hard to get going as fast. And it's hard to stop once you go. So so that could be an issue. But again, like, looking at everybody else who also took Trump tumbles on that launch, like, Nick doesn't carry ballast. That wasn't just Nick, it wasn't just me. He's got natural ballast. So yeah, um, and I think other people might disagree with me about that.
Like, I think I heard from several people who are like, Oh, it was definitely ballast, you weren't running fast enough. And like, again, I have the video. I'm like, I was running normally.
As I stepped off, my left side collapsed. So yeah, I disagree that it was caused by ballast.
But you, you know, being unbiased about it, I can say the way I intend to move forward from this is to continue training, sprinting with ballast. So that's, you know, that's the way I think that I move forward and I don't feel bad about squats, lots of
deadlifts in your future.
Well, and I'm serious about the sprinting part. Like I do, I do that with, with my trainers and I'm excited to, I'm, I'm just back to running, which is great after six months. So I'm excited to be able to, to start going harder on that.
Good. Be your treasure. I appreciate it. I appreciate all the work you do and not just on this, but with our community. And it's been fun. It's been fun to watch. It's been fascinating to watch. It's been a really cool, I mean, your dedication is inspiring. So, I appreciate you and sending you a big hug. I'm glad your foot's all healed up and, you know, you were certainly flying lights out down in Mexico. That was fun to see.
Thanks, Gavin. Yeah. Looking forward. We have, we have a lot more fun stuff to do together and, and to, to do for the community. So thank you for the podcast. And, you know, we, we see what you do as far as putting on the races and helping spread, you know, different stories through our community and different points of view. So thank you for that. If
you find them cloud-based may have a valuable impact on your life. You can support it in a lot of different ways. All of them incredibly important to keep this show going. You can give us a rating on whatever platform you listen to. You can blog about it on your website or share it on social media. You can talk about it on the way up to launch with your friends. I know a lot of good conversations have happened that way. And of course you can support the show financially. The show does take a lot of time, a lot of editing, storage, music, behind the scenes costs. And all we've ever asked for is a buck a show. We put out a show every two weeks. So if you gave us a buck a show, that's a buck a show. So thank you for that. 25 bucks a year, quite a bit less than a magazine subscription and way less than a latte a month. You'll notice we don't have 10 minutes of advertising at the top of the show, which we get asked to do all the time. Believe me, I believe advertising is a pretty toxic business model.
And I want you, the listener to know that these conversations are just authentic people giving their opinions and we aren't being swayed by brands, but that means we rely on you, our listener. If, and only if you can support the show and it doesn't hurt your pocketbook, we'd really appreciate it. Go to the website to find various ways to support the show through Patreon or other platforms where we've gone through great lengths to minimize fees. So your money gets directly to us. Becoming a subscriber gives you access to all kinds of bonus information, little nuggets that don't make it into the podcast, extra content or ask me anything shows and a lot more. We don't put anything behind a paywall and never will. If you can't afford to support the show, just send me an email and I'll set you up with an account. No questions asked. Hopefully someday you'll be where you can.
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for your support. We'll see you at cloudbase.