The World Games - Kaohsiung 16.7.09 - 26.7.09 (Air Sports, Parachuting ends 21.7.09)

Dr. Rainer 'EXI' Hoenle's final report on the World Games 2009 

The World Games 2009 are completed. On the second reserve day, every effort was made to get as many of the parachuting disciplines completed as possible. Even the award-ceremony was delayed by more than 3 hours, until late in the evening.

Follow the links at the foot of this page to access the full results tables, or for daily details go to:

http://results.worldgames2009.tw/WG_Info/en/Comp.mvc/DetailedSchedule/AI

Except for Formation Skydiving all the other events were completed with the scheduled 6 rounds. Formation Skydiving was retired with 5 rounds, having scores that most probably would not have been affected the standings of the Formation Skydiving medalists; USA, Russia and France.

Classical Accuracy needed a tie-breaking round to determine the winner. Stefan Wiesner from Germany dead-centered for Gold with his opponent, from Slovakia, Tibor Juris, hitting 4 cm. Russia’s Eeshikova, one of the 2 females in the male dominated event secured the bronze medal.

Canopy Formations was this time the event of the USA's 2-way-team and its exceptional footage provided by Liz Goodwin who recorded their shattering of the existing world record in the 4th round: being followed by Russia and Australia.

Freeflying, the only discipline in the Artistic events was the last event to be completed. Norway, being in the lead at the top-end of the competition was pushed behind by the French team Babylon during the bottom-end of the 6 rounds, in which the latter team step by step got closer and then passed the Norwegian team for the first rank. England came in third.

The "dominator" of the World Games 2009 was without any doubt, Jay Moledzky from Canada. He won the World Games –Champion title in all 3 events of Canopy Piloting and also won the overall or combined title 2009. No other athlete has ever achieved the same performance in any of the previous first or second category event.

A professionally conducted award ceremony concluded the World Games 2009 in Kaohsiung, Chinese Taipei.

Dr.Rainer EXI Hoenle

Results have been declared in all the parachuting disciplines according to the official web site for the World Games.

The USA head up the overall medal table.

Formation Skydiving: 4-way

The competition was called after 5 rounds

Gold Medal: USA 141

Silver Medal: Russia 125

Bronze Medal: France 121

Canopy Formations: 2-way

Gold Medal: USA

Silver Medal: Russia

Bronze Medal: Australia

Artistic Events: Freefly

Gold Medal: France

Silver Medal: Norway

Bronze Medal: Great Britain

Accuracy:

Gold Medal: Stefan Wiesner, Germany

Silver Medal: Robert Jaris, Slovakia - after a jump-off

Canopy Piloting

Jason Moledzki, Overall Gold Medal and winner of all three elements: Accuracy, Distance and Speed.

As soon as we have news from EXI I hope to fill in the remaining medal winners.

Congratulations to all our athletes.

19th July from Dr. Rainer 'EXI' Hoenle

Sunday evening is here and we can hear the crackers and imagine the fireworks, which will accompany the award ceremony on the World Games Plaza in the city centre of Kaohsiung.

A long day of hanging out at Metropolitan Park ended for Accuracy and Canopy Piloting Athletes with no jumps today and the prospect to be first out tomorrow morning at 06:30 hours to start the first of 2 reserved weather days. Canopy Piloting has only one Speed round finished and Accuracy is waiting to
complete round 2 with the re-jump of the Taiwanese athlete.

Formation Skydiving, Artistic Events and Canopy Formations did not have the best wind conditions, but all teams managed
to somehow make it safely back to the landing area, sometimes by different modes of transport than their own canopies.

Formation Skydiving:

Round 2 started with the random Cataccord. This long piece of formation caught the 4-way from Belgium and Canada by surprise, both loosing the first 3 points due to Non Judgeable situations, but still turning 21 points in time. The US 4-way had no problems to settle in the round with a clean 29 points, while Russia took the chance to pass the unhappy Belgium team, achieving a 4 point lead over their opponents, when turning 27 points in this round. Norway's 4-way recovered from its weakness in round 2 and showed a clean 24 points, the same
score was achieved by the French team.

Ranking after 2 of 6 planned rounds:
USA 51 points
RUS 47 points
BEL 43 points
FRA 42 points
CAN 40 points
NOR 38 points

Canopy Formation

The six teams were able to complete round 2, not handing out a whole bunch of surprises. Russia's 2-way showed its potential by adding the high score of 19 points for a 32 points lead. The US-team on the other hand did not have a fluent performance, stopping the clock at point 15 and being pushed
back to rank 2 with a total of 30 points. Australia hammered out the second best score of the round (16 pts) and closed up to the US by one point.
Sweden's 2-way was passed by team France, which flew 3 points more than the Swedes in this round for a 24:22 point score.
Germany's team, its team-captain suffering from a herniated disc in his neck, came to 8 points in this round, most probably being unable to continue the competition and having shown it’s last performance at these World Games 2009.

Ranking after 2 of 6 planned rounds
RUS 32 points
USA 30 points
AUS 29 points
FRA 24 points
SWE 22 points
GER 17 points

Freeflying filled the last jumpable slots of this windy day, having 4 of the 6 teams in the air for round 3. FRA came up with 8,6 points, GBR with 7,9 points, SWE with 6,9 points and RUS with 6,4 points, not presenting any unexpected surprises. Still to go tomorrow to finish round 3 will be the leading team from Norway and the US-team.

This is a personal view of the events and all results given are unofficial.

EXI 

World Games 2009 continued on July 19, 2009 1330 hrs.

Report from Dr. Rainer 'EXI' Hoenle 

This is my personal report and all results are unofficial.

World Games 2009 continues doing little steps at a time. Meet Director Graham Windsor managed to have Artistic events complete round 2, which is the Speed Round. In this round the Performers are building as many formation-completions in a vertical orientation to the ground as possible within 35 seconds working time. Watching it, it looks pretty much as a round of 2-way Vertical Formation Skydiving, the latter of which is done as a 4-way.

Points as raw material before adjustment to a ten-point scale to be comparable with the non-speed-rounds, were:

NOR 16 points, transforming to 8,4 and totalling 17,0 pts after 2 rounds.
FRA 15 points, transforming to 8,2 and totalling 16,5 pts after 2 rounds.
GBR 12 points, transforming to 7,4 and totalling 14,9 pts after 2 rounds.
USA 13 points, transforming to 7,7 and totalling 14,0 pts after 2 rounds.
SWE 8  points, transforming to 6,1 and totalling 13,0 pts after 2 rounds.
RUS 8  points, transforming to 6,1 and totalling 12,2 pts after 2 rounds.

When this will be continued is up to the weather conditions. And also, Canopy Piloting -athletes still have to do round 2 

19th July, Report from Dr. Rainer 'EXI' Hoenle 

This is my personal report and all results are unofficial.

Yesterday, July 18, 2009, turned out to be a dark day for skydiving. Not one jump done, due to typhoon winds and rain. The competitors were not even called to the airfield and the officials called it a day at 1500 hours.

Today is Sunday, the winds are at or over the limits for Accuracy and Canopy Piloting, but within the legal margin for Formation Skydiving. The 4-ways from Canada, Belgium and Norway concluded round 1. Air-to-Ground-transmission worked with glitches on the exit on one out of the three teams.

Team Belgium tied the USA for the first place with 22 points, Canada did clean 19 points and Norway ended up with 14 points including one bust within a not so clean performance.

Results after round 1 of planned 6 rounds:

USA + Belgium 22 points
Russia 20 points
Canada 19 points
France 18 points
Norway 14 points

18th July report from Dr. Rainer 'EXI' Hoenle

Competition is going on in bits and pieces due to adverse weather conditions. Almost like during some competitions in the past in Central Europe, but fortunately a lot warmer with 30 C temperatures.

This report is a personal view and the results given are unofficial.

Accuracy-competition.

The 10 Accuracy jumpers are close to have finished 2 rounds with one rejump of the local China Teipeh competitor missing for a completion. The first round was challenging for the world class competitors due to unpredictable, but very variable winds out of any direction. Wiesner GER and Glesk AUS came out of it with 1 Cent on the target, followed by Juris SVK 2 with 2 cm and a 3 cm pair consisting of Asztalos HUN and Kajala FIN.
At the bottom of round 2, facing very favourable conditions, there were a couple of dead center jumps, seeing Juris SVK in the lead with a total of 2 cm, followed by Wiesner GER and Kajal FIN with 3 cm and Asztalos with a total of 4 cm.

Accuracy results

Juris Robert      SVK 

002 000 total 002
Wiesner Stefan    GER 

001  002 total 003
Kajala Ville      FIN 

003  000 total 003
Asztalos Istvan   HUN 

003  001 total 004
Jirousek Tibor    CZE 

007  000 total 007
Glesk Tibor       AUS 

001  006 total 007
Ekshikeeva Liubov RUS 

006  002 total 008
Lepezina Olga     RUS 

016  001 total 017

pending RJ
Pan I-lung        TPE

012  RJ

Canopy Piloting -competition

The top athletes of the world did one round through the 70 m carved speed course. Despite having the electronic measurement set to 1/1000 of a second World-Champion Moledzki CAN and World Record holder Batsch USA came out of the race with exactly the same time of 2,985 seconds.
Hernandez ESP  and McMillan AUS arrived at rank 3 and 4, followed by Kruger RSA and Leiras BRA, all being only separated by 1/10 of a second. Allum ITA and Smith GBR concluded the competitors staying below 3,6 s.
Coming in with 4,437 was Thoegersen SWE.
Next discipline scheduled will be Distance.

Speed-Results
Moledzki CAN / Batsch USA  100    pts
Hernandez ESP                85.140 pts
McMillan AUS                 83.536 pts
Kruger RSA                   80.400 pts
Leiras BRA                   78.226 pts
Allum ITA                    74.046 pts
Smith GBR                    69.598 pts
Thoegersen SWE               45.260 pts

Artistic Event -Freeflying

6 nations compose the competition. One round is completed.
For insiders not a big surprise, but team Norway is in the lead, excelling in both, technical and presentation performance and a total score of 8,6 points. Team France only trails by 0.3 points being comfortably separated from third placed team Great Britain with 7,5 points. The bottom half of the ranking list is lead by team Sweden (6,9 points), followed by team USA (6,3) and team Russia (6,1).

Canopy Formations competition

In the Canopy Formation event team Australia tied team Russia with 13 points after the first round in second place, while team USA jumped into a clean lead with a 15 pointer. Team Sweden hovers in the medal rank reaching position four by trailing with only 1 point behind the Aussie/Russian duo. One more point behind is team France. Team Germany performed 9 points in rank 6.

Formation Skydiving -Competition

Only three of the 6 teams had the chance to start round one of the event.
Team France had video-problems on the exit and lost one point scoring 18 points. Russia made 20 points to reach second place and USA leads the trio with 22 points. Standby for completing the first out of planned 6 rounds are the 4-way-teams from Canada, Belgium and Norway.

Report and all pictures from Ronald Overdijk:  17th July 2009

The World Games have been formally declared open by IWGA president Ron Froelich, after a spectacular ceremony in the brand new Kaohsiung stadium. 30000 spectators saw a show, the march of the athletes including parachutists competing in 5 events, singers and fireworks which could rival the 2008 Olympics.

85 top athlete parachutists are jumping in canopy piloting, accuracy landing, canopy formation 2-way, formation skydiving 4-way and freeflying. With co-operative weather all athletes could make 1 or 2 competition jumps July 17th from 2 BK 117 helicopters. The competition venue is the Metropolitan Park in the northern ranges of host city Kaoshiung.

IPC president Mr. Graeme Windsor is acting as meet director. FAI secretary general Mr. Max Bishop is in the Jury. A typhoon passing July 18th is putting all jumps on hold for the present, giving staff and athletes time to catch up with each other.