17 years ago
The Extremesportsweek has began in Voss, Norway! This year the event is celebrating it's 10th birthday and as always it includes B.A.S.E. jumping, skydiving, paragliding, hanggliding, kayaking, rafting, kiting, big air, BMX/MTB, climbing and longboarding demos and competitions, making it one of the biggest events in the world! Besides the festival with many shows and concerts.
The opening ceremony was held sunday afternoon with skydiving, BASE, hanggliding and paragliding acro shows in front of many impressed spectators.
Today was the registration day and equipment check for all pilots followed by a safety briefing explaining the winching method. This year there won't be helicopter jumps, all the tasks will be runned by 4 powerful winching boats which are strong enough even to tow up the hanggliders in any wind condition. If it works well next year they will use the same boats for the 2nd World Championship. The boats go all the way till the end of the lake where they turn back and return to the starting place, providing great altitude (700-1000+ meters) to execute the maneuvers. In the afternoon all the pilots did training flights to practice the towing and to warm up for the competition - the first tasks will be held tomorrow.
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Hi Eduard!
Today was the 2nd competition day in Voss. Up to know we had 2 completed solo run and one syncho, today afternoon the day was cancelled due to the strong seabrease entering the valley. The hangliders also did 2 tasks, unfortunately there are only 4 pilots.
I cant tell results now, because the judges had serious problems with the new calculating software they got and all the results came out wrong. They had to recalculate all the results with another program and they are still working on the results.
Yesterday there was a great party (every day, actually), Norwegien people really like to drink crazy...We went to sleep at 4pm so it was a little bit difficult to show up at the briefing at 8 and fly the task soon after :)
To tell the truth there are things what makes the competitors pretty dissapointed in the organization. They doesn't provide any food, except breakfast and no accomodation for the pilots (however it is written in the FAI rules - for World Cups), now even a place to camp. Most of the pilots sleep somewhere around the event place in tents or just in their sleeping bags, but some of them were already asked by the police to move. Norway is a really expensive country so almost noone can pay for a hostel or apartment, but even the daily food is a lot for most of the pilots (one single beer is like 6-7 EUR). However this competition is a World Cup and also the Pre World Championship it is only part of a huge event and the only thing what they provide for the pilots is the boat towing, but not even a T-Shirt.
There are finally 42 solo pilots and 5 teams participating, more news coming soon.
Pál
Please, Pal and Gabor, give us news :)! The Vertigo website is not updated with results. I hope things are going well for you!
Eduard.