13 years ago
Yesterday the Swiss Champs has begin at the beautiful Walensee in the east part of Switzerland hosted by the Robair paragliding school.
On this event a brand new competition concept is being tested. The basic idea follows a direction that most of the pilots are looking forward to: no more sheets to fill out before the tasks, the judges only say how many maneuvers must be flown but all the rest is up to the pilot. So they can perform any routine (respecting the safety rules) without having to announce it before. The scoring system is also pretty different with more importance of the choreography. The sum of the points of all tricks given by the judges gets multiplied with the average coefficient of those specific maneuvers. The scoring system also allows to see actual results straight away when the pilot(s) is reaching shore so the final results are also ready to see on a big television a few minutes after the last pilot/team has landed. The main intention is the test and improove this system to possibly use it the World Cup Series in the future. The fact that it is so new there are still many questions open both for the pilots and the jury but at the same time it is great to see working "in action" and make adjustments in the meantime. You can watch the un-cut video (in French and German) about Swiss Acro League team leader Gilles Berreux introducing the rules on the first briefing or Claudio explaining straight from the judge panel in between scoring 2 synchro teams.
The weather started rainy both on Thursday and today but cleared up quickly and allowed the 8 synchro teams 17 solo pilots to finish 2-2 runs in each category.