Somewhere in July it all went a bit wrong.
First, Xavier Murillo went missing in Peru. When someone goes missing in the mountains you think two things: they're gone; but maybe there's some hope.
It then becomes important – increasingly important – not to give up hope as the days stretch on.
The Xavier is Missing story was well covered on XCmag.com and elsewhere. It became the biggest search and locate mission for a paraglider pilot ever, I think. It harnessed the power of the web and social media to raise thousands to keep the plane flying and keep the search going.
Sitting at a keyboard we became a sort of hub. By chance we had a writer there - Kiwi Johnston. He did a brilliant job. It wasn't really until about Day 3 that Bob – my colleague on XCmag – told me he was out there. We grabbed him and asked him to write what he was seeing.
Later that same week I was working on something for the website when an email pinged in from Louise Joselyn at CIVL. She was asking us not to publish anything online as there was a 'situation'. Posters on PGforum and elsewhere had started speculating that some pilots at the Paragliding World Championships had had accidents.
The live tracking that pilots fly with nowadays allows you to see everything near enough in real time. Thus you get to watch as pilots descend under their reserve, albeit you only see a little track against a Google Earth background.
It turned out two people had died in separate accidents, and five others threw their reserves.
This was the worst possible outcome. Traffic online on xcmag.com went off the chart, and as the story unfolded we tried sensitively to pose some legitimate questions to the organisers in Piedrahita.
The thing about these situations is you more or less know everybody involved. Or rather, you know some people and the rest are 'family'. We all do the same thing, like the same aspects of the sport – freedom, adventure, passion etc – and have similar experiences. When we read about someone spiralling to the ground struggling to free their hands from twisted risers unable to reach the handle of their emergency parachute, then it is truly gut-wrenching. We feel it, because we've been there, or similar places, and we can clearly imagine it.
What was particularly galling about the World Championships this year, and this is my personal opinion, is that it was like a tea-party laid out with poisoned tea-cups. It looked fantastic - it should have been fantastic - and yet people fell out of the sky.
The gliders offer the best performance they ever have, and yet they bite twice as hard. Many pilots didn't have a proper chance to get to know their new gliders, 'forced' on them by new rules; and many pilots, it seems, didn't understand how to fly them properly. Throw in a heap of pressure, a lot of excitement, a lot of rule-making, and wide-eyed talk about 'safety' and it was a heady mix.
What's amazing is that this story doesn't go beyond the small world of free flight. Two people die in a cycling race and it would at least make the news. A canoe tragedy ditto. Climbers falling off Mont Blanc at least get a paragraph. Do that in the Himalaya and you might get a film out of it. And yet it barely got beyond the local newspapers in Spain, Argentina and Chile (home of the deceased pilots).
You often see in this sport a plea for wider recognition. A sort of, 'Don't they understand what a wonderful thing it is that we are doing?' I have always argued that paragliding couldn't handle the rigorous attention that mainstream media attention would bring. The only thing the MMS would be interested in are the reserve throws and the near misses. Serious accidents would be front page news, and deaths a cause for resignations, top-to-bottom political reorganisation and serious analysis.
As it is, we don't have rigorous press interest, so not a huge amount of accountability, and so things drag along. Change comes from within, slowly, and outside influence is minimal.
End of the Line, Cross Country, issue 137
I was sad to be a pilot this summer, and I was sad to be part of the World Championships and the gloss that surrounded it. We thought a lot about how to approach it in issue 137, and in the end we just took a long look at how we got here. I think it is the longest article we've ever published in Cross Country magazine.
It doesn't provide any answers, but in a sport where even the keenest pilots often don't know who CIVL is or what the FAI is or how competitions are run, it was, I think, a decent contribution.
There's a danger in sport of being overtaken by ambition, of passion turning into obsession. I think that happens in paragliding quite a lot. Pilots who start out with a love for what they do and what the sport brings them tread a line of obsessiveness, where it's 'all or nothing' and do-or-die. I've never believed it should be like that – the price isn't worth paying.
Read issue 137 online
See what's in Cross Country 137
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