Marcus Budgett – Earn & Learn

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Marcus’ Story

After a lot of preparation for the event, the weather unfortunately wasn’t on our side this year (2016) . My role was to check in competing teams back in after jumping, helping with dropzone control and assisting in any other areas to cope with the huge amount of people at the event.

Despite the forecast, we took every chance possible to get the competition going and get as much done as possible. Our best was not good enough and so the competition rolled over to the next weekend with 2/3 rounds left to complete. Over 45 4-way formation skydiving teams came back the following weekend to get the competition completed.

Running immediately after that, the 8-way,freefly, freestyle and speed skydiving disciplines could commence. With a big push and lots of Hibaldstow team effort, we managed to finish just before midday on Saturday and so the rest could begin.

I too was competing in the Freefly and after seeing my team on the manifest screens with a short time left before take off, I was relieved from work and it was my time to compete! I defiantly had mixed emotions at this point as I had never competed in skydiving before. My team had spent a lot of time and effort into getting prepared for the event and I didn’t feel I was in 100% competition mode. This was probably due to nerves, but I was also excited to compete for the first time.

Unfortunately, the weather rolled in again and we didn’t get to jump until Sunday afternoon. We managed to get 4 of the 5 rounds complete and we were in 3rd place with one jump left to do the following day. The weather was great in the morning and we did the final competition round scoring a 8.1. This brought us up to a silver medal position which we was really happy with.

It was all over so fast, then 30 mins after getting all the final scores, it was back to work to help keep the Hibaldstow machine running. It was a pleasure to work and compete in the nationals, it takes a huge team effort every year to host the event, so it is pretty tiring.

To get the nationals completed in two weekends which both rolled over to the Mondays with the weather not on our side was truly unbelievable. Also, it was a great learning curve for me about how freefly artistics are judged and the difference in just fun jumping and the preparation needed to do well in competition.