Asian Beach Games 2012 - Task 5 Bowling Landing

After a long first day, competitors arrived on site at 0615, ready for a second day of what had already become a fierce competition. There was a clear overnight leader in Jiri George MACAK, but it was very early days and George just needed to make one mistake to drop down the order.

With a relatively high cloud base, a clean onshore wind and no sign of the fog that enshrouded the competition site for most of the previous day, the weather conditions were very good and set the scene for another packed day of flying.

The first task of the day was Bowling Landing, an adaptation of the Accuracy Landing flown last night. Rather than aiming for the centre of a mat, pilots were faced with 5 ‘pins’, the goal being to knock down as many of the pins as possible before first touching the ground.

This required a different technique from pure accuracy landing; instead of a steady and constant descent to produce a pinpoint landing, the most successful method was to remain high and then swoop down at the last second before flaring out and carrying a lot of speed through the target area.

The first few pilots struggled, the wind was strong enough to blow them backwards in the last few metres, but again the better pilots were holding off just short of the target before dropping quickly to gain speed and then levelling out, their foot outstretched to score some points.

Jiri George MacakThe Korean Dong Oh JUNG, who was lying 25th in the overall standings up until the start of this task, overturned the form guide and flew in to kick over 4 of the 5 pins before a successful landing. This was good enough for third place in the provisional results and a very valuable 25 points. The top two positions were again occupied by Thais; overall leader Jiri George MACAK knocked over all 5 pins as did his teammate Nopar INTHARAUMNUAY, sharing top spot and 30 points. George was clearly delighted and gave a ‘thumbs up’ on landing.

There was little rest after the last landing. Team leaders were immediately called in for the next briefing; the Slalom 8 task would start in less than 45 minutes. This competition was intense and destined to produce worthy Games winners.

Results are available at http://results.haiyang2012.com.

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