WAG 2015 - Day 6

Sunday, 6th December

The Judges on their way to the Pond for the last time at this competition - 7.30 lift off for the third round of Canopy Piloting Freestyle, in the background the iconic skyline of Dubai and myriad balloons which had an even earlier start this morning.

The final round confirmed the first place of Nick Batsch, USA - Gold Medal Winner.  When we spoke with him afterwards he said he realised that for this last round he had to do something special as the competition was so fierce - and he went for it and pulled it off with the best score of the round 42.4 = 100 points.  Gage Galle, USA was second and Abdullbari Quabaisi, UAE in third place.

The Canopy Piloting competition is over and the prize giving will be at 6.00 this evening.  Thank you to all the competitors, judges, officials, technical people for a really exciting and excellent competition. 

13.30 - A change to the declared results from yesterday's article.  The Team Event.  The UAE have withdrawn from the team event, so the Bronze Medal goes to Denmark.

On the way down the pond !

By early afternoon all the other events had finished their practice round and so the Competition started.  In the Accuracy Landings event taking place on the Beach DZ the first round was unable to be completed due to the above limit winds  and so they had to stop jumping by 3.30 pm.  At the moment we have 17 individual male accuracy jumpers with a score of 0.00 - and then the next 23 on 0.01 cm.  So the top 40 competitors are seperated from the rest of the field by 1 cm.

Tomorrow it is scheduled to start with a Widi load at 7.50, but unfortunately bad weather with high winds is forecast.  It would be a great pity if we were unable to continue now the competition in Accuracy Landings has started.

Meanwhile at the Horse Race DZ the Formation Skydiving battles that were expected in the 4-Way Open and the 4-Way Female were unfolding, with in the Open Event the Belgium 4-Way were one point behind the USA and in the 4-Way Female France were beating the USA by 1 point.  Tomorrow morning it will be the start of the 8-Way and VFS.

Meanwhile Canopy Formations 4-Way Rotations is one team short of completing their 2nd round.  It is the turn of 2-Way Sequential in the early morning..

The Artistic Event judges have yet to complete their first round judging so there are no scores published for either event.

Speed however has got off to a good start with two rounds almost completed and some really fast times.

It is a very early start in the morning for the Canopy Formation Teams who are due to start (wethar permitting at 7.00 a.m.)

This evening the Medal Ceremony for Canopy Piloting was held along with two other ceremonies within the Wrold Air Games for the Hot Airships and ParaGliding Accuracy competitions.

With the 4 usual medal ceremonies for Canopy Piloting: Zone Accuracy, Speed, Distance and the Overall were added the Team event and Freestyle.

It was a well arranged and prestigeous ceremony with all the top officials from both the Higher Organising Committee of the Dubai side of the World Air Games, along with the Executive Committee and Senior members of the FAI.  Regan Tetlow did the announcing and there was a good attendance of competitors and officials from all three Events.

CP Zone Accuracy, Gold Curtis Bartholomew, USA	CP Speed, Gold Medal Nick Batsch, USA
CP Distance, Gold Medal Cordelia Mahai, UAE	CP Overall, Gold Medal Curtis Bartholomew, USA
CP Team, Gold Medal U.S.A.	CP Freestyle, Gold Medal, Nick Batsch, USA

When we spoke with Nick Batsch after the Freestyle round to congratulate him, he talked about the standard of the competition and said he was really pleased to have pulled off his moves and that he was working hard on developing more.  He also commented that 5 years ago the standard of some of the moves being made then was way above those today, due to the ProTour including Freestyle within its overall classification - so to win Overall you had to do good Freestyle. 

He did say that the big difference was the size of the blades and with the larger older ones it was easier to control the canopy, as they were not so fast as some of the really small ones beng used today.  He put his poor (! by his standards) Distance performance down to using the smallest canopy and he felt he may go up one size to give him more control of the distance flight. 

During the afternoon there was a Competitors Meeting, during which the method used for weighing competitors at this competiton, was discussed. It was not what competitors were used to and had resulted in 4 competitors receiving the default score (0).  Although they agreed that the rules had been followed 'to the letter', it was not  the "common practice" method used at other competitions which competitors were used to.  The result of the disucssion was a  recommendation to the committee to reword the current rules.