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!

On the upcoming weekend of 27th and 28th of Jun the the beach of Geneva will be busy with an event called Global Vibes, based on the four elements: air, earth, fire, water. The air will be represented by some of the world's greatest acro pilots during a daily show. The pilots will launch from the Baby Plage, using a winching boat from 2 pm. through all the afternoon and the evening! In the meantime tons of other programs and concerts will entertain the public.

Come over to watch us and enjoy the show!

+ info at: http://www.wix.com/globalvibes/Live

On friday the last solo, on saturday the last synchro task was done, both with cloudless weather, however turbulent conditions due to thermal activity and the wind which made landings quite tricky since the small lake is surrounded by hills all around.

In solo the task was the same just as the second one with restricted announced program, where the pilots could perform each maneuver only one time in the program. The last flight brought big changes in the final ranking. Raúl Rodriguez won the task with an outstanding score of 95,42 points (the highest in the whole comp.) and climbed up to the 4th position.
The winner of the first 2 tasks, Pál Takáts had a good enough run to keep his first position, however at the very end he splashed into the water, getting almost no scores for the landing (6th position in the final run), which was enough to burn his 6 points lead and to end up on the overall 3rd place, after Horacio Llorens and Antoine Montant both performed flawless flights with nice landings.

In synchro the SAT Brothers did very well again, winning all 3 tasks and the World Air Games gold medals with some 8 points ahead justACRO Team, followed by Against the Grain.

TOP 10 solo, final results:

1. LLORENS FERNANDEZ Horacio 273,31 pts.
2. MONTANT Antoine 272,62 pts.
3. TAKáTS Pál 270,84 pts.
4. RODRIGUEZ Raúl 265,59 pts.
5. MESCHUH Alexander 253,65 pts.
6. RODRIGUEZ Felix 251,92 pts.
7. KéZI Gábor 251,59 pts.
8. PLANTON Cyril 236,47 pts.
9. HORNBOECK Bernd 234,26 pts.
10. CERUTTI Hervé 230,30 pts.

TOP 3 synchro, final results:

1. SAT Brothers 255,46 pts.
2. justACRO Team 247,83 pts.
3. Against the Grain 235,26 pts.

Congratulations to all pilots!
The next World Air Games will be held in 2011, follow the news at the official FAI World Air Games site!

Yesterday another solo and synchro run was held at the World Air Games, finally with optimal conditions, higher cloudbase, light wind and lot's of sunshine. In solo many of the top pilots performed flawless tricks at an extremely high nivo, giving only a couple of point differences in the techical scoring, so the landing points got very big importance. justACRO Team pilots Pál Takáts and Gábor kézi finished first and second, followed by the french superstars, Cyrille Planton, Antoine Montant and spanish Raúl Rodriguez The overall ranking after run 2 is:

Rank - Nat. - Name - Run 1. - Run 2. - TOTAL

1. HUN TAKáTS Pál 93,05 | 94,46 | 187.51 pts
2. FRA MONTANT Antoine 91,52 | 90,14 | 181.66 pts
3. ESP LLORENS FERNANDEZ Horacio 91,59 | 89,90 | 181. 49 pts
4. FRA PLANTON Cyril 87,54 | 91,74 | 179,28 pts
5. HUN KéZI Gábor 82,61 | 94,37 | 176,98 pts

In synchro the Rodriguez Brothers performed an excellent run again, giving no chance to catch up for the followers, the justACRO Team and Against the Grain.

1 SAT Brothers 86,57 | 84,46 | 171,03 pts
2 justACRO Team 83,96 | 83,23 | 167, 19 pts
3 Against the grain Team 81,50 | 81,35 | 162,85 pts

Today is a resting day in the competition schedule with very-very hot weather. In the next 2 days another synchro and solo run is planned and the price giving ceremony will be held in Torino on friday and saturday. Stay tuned!

Despite the very bad weather forecast, the expected thunderstorms did not come and the first synchro run was successfully completed with a 4 maneuver free announced program. The SAT Brothers, Raul and Félix took the lead, 2 points ahead of justACRO Team, with Against the Grain on the 3rd place.
Good news is that Horacio did a free training flight today and he feels great to continue the competition, but only in solo category.

Check out the results at the World Air Games site:
http://www.wag2009.com/eng/results/index.htm

There is daily live coverage of the WAG and the acro competition in the italian RAI Sport+ television, follow this link and click on Diretta Sport+ on the right side (live daily between ~12:30 and ~14:00, repeating always daily at midnight).

Wednesday will go on with an early solo task starting at 10:30 and if the weather stays favourable, probably another synchro task in the early afternoon.

Today the weather wasn't so optimal as yesterday, mixed with stronger easterly wind, some low clouds and building up thunderstorm, finally some showers in the afternoon. Raul and Pittoco could perform their solo re-runs at first, but the following synchro task was cancelled. Unfortunately during yesterday's run Horacio Llorens (World Cup Champion in 2008) had a strong landing on the raft, which is almost completely unprotected and quite hard. He had a medical check in the hospital where a light back injury was discovered. Horacio is back with the pilots already and he is ready to continue the contest tomorrow!

The results of the first solo run were published, tomorrow will go on with solo again.

View the World Air Games solo results
View the detailed scores