Paragliding World Championships - Roldanillo, Colombia - Day 1 Task

My expectation is that we may fly every day.  
Conditions will probably be good everyday.  
We will fly far everyday.

What we need is a new scale of good.  I haven't figured out what that scale looks like but in the interests of the conservation of hyperbole I will try tone it down a little by ignoring the fact that the first competition day was totally freaking epic by any measure with 138 pilots in goal.  We could have flown for another two or three hours rather than the paltry eighty eight odd kilometers.  The 2,900 m ceiling was in danger of being popped.   

The points suggest the task was too easy with the top one hundred in goal getting 700 or more.  For those of you unfamiliar with the scoring in a paragliding task: The winner can get a maximum of one thousand points.  Anything over nine hundred is considered fantastic and more than eight hundred is good.

When a third of the field receives nine hundred or more and another third between eight and nine hundred it just about amounts to a discard.  Add to that the progressive discard system and we will see some extremely high scores for the podium.

In the end Petr Kostrhun took it from LucaD and StephanG in just over two hours and fifteen minutes.

Laurie took it ahead of Seiko and Keiko in the ladies competition.  I sometimes wonder why we have gender based scoring if you consider that these pilots regularly finish in the top twenty overall and may not care about the women's result.

Team SA had everyone in goal with Russel in the top ten dragging us into 18th position as a nation (out of 38).  The rest of us got spanked.  In my case the points hide the hiding I received having ventured into the flats at the end in search of glory only to suck on a fifteen minute delay as I ran out of altitude with 5km to go.

The organisers will be also be happy with a good start to this festival.