15 years ago
The biggest spanish paragliding meeting and exhibition was celebrating its 10th aniversary this weekend! The small village of Segura de la Sierra, on the foothills of Yelmo mountain hosted more than 300 pilots and every evening, once the the strong conditions calmed down the sky completely filled up with paragliders, which looked like a cloud of mosquitos from the landing place. During the day invited international and spanish pilots were entertaining the crowd, like Alejandro and Raúl Rodriguez, Horacio Llorens from the SAT Team, the Green Twins, the justACRO Team with Pál and Gábor, and with paramotor Ramón Morillas, Mathieu Rouanet and Thomas Dordolot pulled some crazy tricks.
On saturday evening the first ever paramotor freestyle competition was held with judges composed of justACRO Team and other paramotor pilots. The participants had 5 minutes to perform their free program, which always started a couple of hundred meters high with some acro tricks and ended up in close-ground playing. The french Mathieu Rounaet showed the public why is he the world champion of the discipline. After some impressive acro tricks like a super speedy Asymmetric SAT and a HUGE looping, he continued with hardcore "waga" session, just a few meters from the spectators who were absolutely stucked in their seats of what they've witnessed. Finally the top 3 finishers were Mathieu, Raúl and Ramón.
In the exhibition tent Raúl had also his own stand of his new company, the RR Acro Wings, the first one in the history of paragliding, only specialized in designing acro gliders. The competition model the Radix is already finished and the freestyle glider, called the Matrix is about to get to the market as well. Despite that the Matrix is being promoted as as an "intermadiate" glider, with its low aspect ratio, long lines and compact profile Raúl is showing some extremely radical tricks with his 16m2 prototype, such as getting up from SAT to Infinity in not more than only 4-5 rotations, which has never seen before.
He said: "Right now I am super busy with the business and just cannot wait to get some free time to go to fly and train with my new toys. I am full of motivation and have some ideas of new maneuvers, I just need the airtime to work it, but the Matrix is definitely the tool to discover something new!".
Sounds great, we can't wait either!
