With the cancellations of several competitions the 2009 season of the Aerobatics Paragliding World Cup Tour schrinked to only 2 events, the Paranoia Acrobatixx (solo category only, including the Austrian Championship) and Acroaria, the Pre-World Championship in Italy. In total it gave 6 valid solo runs for the final ranking.
The Paranoia Acrobatixx (17-19th July), hosted by the lovely touristic town of Zell am See was celebrating it's 5th edition! Not less than 40 international pilots started the race, including 12 austrians.
After a very early start at 7.00 am in the morning to complete the qualification for the newcomer pilots, the competition started. The weather forecast was bad, but just before the thunderstorms arrived over Zell am See the first task was completed for all pilots. Due to the lower height difference of the startplace the tasks consist of 3 maneuvers only (meaning that only the first maneuver can be Tumbling, Rythmic SAT or Infinity).
Bernd Hornboeck, the Austrian pilot from the team Against the Grain flew to the first place with his brand new acro glider the Thriller from U-Turn, taking a good 3 points advantage in front of Hernan Pittoco (AR), Cyrille Planton (FR) and Horacio Llorens (SP), all 3 riding Sol Supersonic (1st run results). Soon after the last pilot landed it started to rain heavily which didn't stop till next morning, and left a 10 centimeters of fresh snow up on the mountains during the night. Then on saturday it started to clear up early and the second run could start before midday, however the pilots did not welcomed the freezing temperatures up at launch in the middle of the summer. Cyrille Planton won the second task with more than 91 points, but Bernd performed well again making the 4th position in the run and keeping his overall first postition. His team mate Marcel Schrittwieser - who performed great in the first run already took the second place, ahead of Horacio Llorens as third, impressing everybody with his precise spiral landing - as usual (2nd run results)! With 88.35 points Hernan came "only" as 5th, but this also shows the nowadays more and more common "tight score" competition between the leading pilots. The top 4-6 usually performs their figures practically perfectly, so the landing points - which anyway only weights 10% of the total scoring- take a much bigger part of the game.
In the final 3rd run (3rd run results), after 3 days of precise tricks and full concentration, Bernd messed up his first figure which was enough to boost him down to 6th in the final results. Not like his team mate Marcell who impressed everybody with his clean tricks and great performance during the whole weekend, taking 3rd place and the bronze medal in overall, as well as the gold medal of the first official Austrian Championship! The SAT members Hernan Pittoco (1st) and Horacio Llorens (2nd) shared the highest steps of the solo podium with finishing just like 1 points difference between them, whilst Cyrille Planton came in 4th and Félx Rodriguez 5th flying the Ozone FLX2. There would be another long list of young and talented pilots to mention from Austria, Germany and Switzerland (like Remo Niederer, Yves Berlovitz, Oehl Lino, Bauer Josef, the Kahn brothers, Schweizer Johan and so on, just to name a few...) who all did great, some of them doing their very first or just second competition season.
This year it was the 8th edition of the Acroaria in Omegna with a great number of participants, 44 in solo and 13 synchro teams!
Interview with Bernd Hornboeck, winner of the synchro category.
justACRO - Soooo, first of all BIG congratz for your first position! I love to see your smiling faces on the podium :-)
Bernd - Thank you! This synchro comp was very interesting from my point of view.
On the first day we started with a nice but not perfect run, so we finished at the 3rd place behind SATisfaction (Horacio & Hernan) and the Peritas (Alex Rodriguez & Javier "Malagita" Tejero from Spain). We had launched almost as last from all the teams and couldn't see the runs of the other teams but what surprised me a lot was that Peritas received about 23 points for the synchro. I have never seen more than 20 points for that in any competition (later it turned out that it was just one of the several calculation mistakes on the event).
During the whole competition the average height above the water was quite low. Normally I'm used to have a lot of altitude at this place. Of course depending on the thermal activity some teams/pilots had a very nice altitude in between but the average was not so good. Because of this it was very important to work out a good "tactic" with Xandi and not to be in the situation that we miss one maneuver. For example the Against the Grain youngsters Basti & Ricky Kahn (team Lorit) did a synchro spiral in every of their 3 runs but got ZERO points for the synchro spiral in every single run!!!
justACRO - Ouch that sounds bad! Unfortunately the rules are the rules...but by the way, I think 3 full rotations close to each other to validate a syncho spiral takes enourmous altitude with nowadays acro wings!
Bernd - Yes, absolutely! Stefan Hodek was the head judge and was very precise about minimum rotations and stuff like that, but he was also VERY neutral about the pilots and teams. That means that he didn't care about who he was judging; he was treating everybody the same! And that's exactly the way it should be...
Afterwards our 2nd run was also not perfect but OK, we could stay at the 3rd place. some teams changed places...
We had a quite nice final run with some very-close-to-each-other synchro and a nice flow.
There were some teams that received ZERO points for their mirror spiral (Lorit, SATistfaction, Lucky Clowns, etc.). I haven't been there anymore because we went up to fly again for the expression session, but others told me some pilots were pretty pissed about it...Xandi, Marcell and me went to do the expression session as team "genossen homofürst extremal" and showed some really nice synchro with 3 wings flying close to each other.
After all I'm very happy, we could finish all of our runs (completing all the maneuvers) and could show a quite constant performance. We had very differnt wings this year. Xandi is competing with the Icaro Nikita which has quite short lines, and me on the new U-Turn Thriller with 45cm longer lines than Xandi...So we had to improvise a lot ;-)
justACRO - So work on those lines up for next time! I also have to pick-up 15 kg's to get perfectly synchronized... :-) Bernd, thanks a lot for your impressions, congratz and big hugs buddies!
SATisfaction in synchro spiral
Understandably there was a mess around the scoring, unvalid tricks and numbers of minimum rotations...Many pilots reported failures or calculation mistakes after the daily results were published. Some synchro teams complained as well after it turned out that in the official FAI rules available on the Acroaria website the number of minimum rotations for syncho spiral are only 2 complete turns, whilst the judges requested 3 during the event! The SATisfaction team and even one of the judges announced an official complain to the FAI to sort out the situation, but if it will ever effect the final results in some way, nobody knows.
Top5 Synchro results
1. Against the Grain - Hornboeck Bernd, Meschuh Alexander (232,20 pts.)
2. Satisfaction - Pitocco Hernan, Llorens Horacio (227,48 pts.)
3. Verell Freestyle - Yoan Castagnoli, Cyril Planton (220,12 pts.)
4. Peritas - Rodriguez Alex, Tejeiro Lopez Javier (204,11 pts.)
5. Acrotwins - Green Thimothy, Green Anthony (204,09 pts.)
...
From the results of the 6 completed World Cup solo runs, spanish Horacio Llorens won, for the second time in a row, but the official World Cup results are not released yet...
Despite the Acro World Cup series had its "poorest" season ever with only 2 solo and 1 synchro event, however all the pilots strongly hope that the tendency will change again and that in the future there will be several new comps organized at new locations!
