9th Day of the Mondial, 6th December 2012

6th December 2012 - day 8 of competition

15.00  After 6 days of sunshine, today we have low clouds covering the DZ when the wind drops!  I feel for the final round of accouracy jumpers who have been on stand-by since 8.00 this morning!  Everything else is complete in terms of having been jumped.  We are still waiting for the final judgements to be made of the 4-way Canopy Piloting events - following a team protesting their disqualification, and Style.

13.00   The Formation Skydiving 8-way event is over.  As expected the USA won with 229 points with a flying last round - and brought their average for the competition to a new record of 22.9 :  France came second with 225 equalling the USA last round total of 25.  Russia came in 3rd with a total of 192 points.

UAE, in their first World Championships in this difficult discipline, came in a very credible 6th having made the cut for the Final Round.

Today's Birthdays

10.30 hrs:  

A later start this morning - 8.30am - to finalise the last round of Freefall Style and the the much awaited FS 8-Way, with the final rounds of canopy formation taking place out at the racecourse.  We have a fair degree of thin cloud cover, but not enough to ground proceedings at the moment. 

An early seekie load was caught out by the wind conditions coming into the arena over the high rise buildings and one of their number ended up taking an early swim.  So accuracy on hold for the moment, although Canopy Formations and Style continued jumping onto the racecourse.  At 10.30 the Formation Skydiving 8-way teams in the Final cut-off (6 teams) emplaned for their last round jumps. 

10.45 and the conditions are improving, looks like we will soon be underway with the last rounds of individual accuracy.

The prize giving ceremony is planned for 16.00 hrs this afternoon, and the podium is hurridly being built on the Drop Zone.