National Championships Part 2

The National Championships have been held at Skydive Hibaldstow since 1996. In that time the dropzone have become experts at shifting large numbers of jumpers through even the smallest weather gaps. Fortunately, this weekend there was no need for hole spotting and yet again the competition was completed within 2 days.

So let’s take a look at who won what. In the Freestyle A, there were 2 teams who took part – Al and Pixie from well known team, Airkix Freestyle and then newcomers to the sport, Euphoria Freestyle who last year were known as Team Alex in the B class. Al and Pixie are a well formed act and easily took gold with a score of 59.10. Good luck to them as they prepare for Dubai.

In the Freefly B, we had 2 new teams. They had a very close battle with each other and were within 1 point through their first 3 rounds. In the final round 5 though, Team Rekka had a poor final jump which caused them to drop 3.1 points to take the silver.

Freefly A was the best turned out of the Artisitics disciplines with a total of 4 teams who took part. Interestingly, none of them were scratch teams and all of them had put some effort into their training. There was an exciting jump off for silver between Kinetic and Varial. During a team meeting on the Saturday, neither team wanted to do the jump and were happy to accept either a silver or bronze medal. However, Kate Charters the chief judge insisted on the jump-off and when this finally happened the next day, Kinetic took it. Well done also goes to Volare who did an exciting routine to finish with an average of 8.1. They are also attending the World Championships and have to defend their World silver medal from 2010.

Moving on to the formation skydiving disciplines, this weekend was the turn of the 8-way teams. Split into 2 categories, Intermediate and Senior there were a total of 9 teams who took part. In the Intermediate class, there were 2 scratch teams who were organised by local DZ coach, Stu Ferguson. Hadron took the gold with double the points of Reprobabies taking a gold total of 31.

In the Senior 8-way class, it was always going to be a battle against MicroClim8 and BritChicks who are going to Dubai. The BritChicks decided not to scoreboard and made a valiant effort, however with each round, MicroClim8 pulled a few points away. The only exception was round 7, where BritChicks did brilliantly taking a point back. So MicroClim8 finished in style taking the gold. For one of their team members, Pookie, this is his 16th gold in a row! So BritChicks took silver and their B team, BritChicks Evolution took bronze. They deserve special mention as well, consider that some of their members took silver in the 4-way the weekend before.

So that wraps up another Nationals at Hibaldstow, but it’s not over for the season. This weekend, we have the bigway headdown record organised by the BLT’s and some bigway FS organised by Simon Cathrine.