Sunday July 8, 2001
    A marked frontal boundary moved across politely during the night and in contrast to the predictions the morning sky is clear and the air sparkling clean with excellent visibility. The temperature at 1,500 meters is in contrast to yesterday almost 10oC lower which clearly shows unstable layering. Today it'll definitely fly.



    Sharp sunlight from the morning onward blazed down with unusual strength and in light of the mild north wind it is decided at the morning briefing to start today from the highest starting ground Golte-Boskovec, which, due to the heavy clouds last Thursday, the racers didn't even get to see, let alone take off from.



    The discipline flown on Friday is in the end annulled, because two of the participants were found seriously lacking in documentation of their flights and the number of successful racers with a minimum distance reached thereby fell below 20% of the over all count. So the currently leading racer Tomas Brauner, starts all over again today. But there is no nervousness discernable about him at all, nor even any bitterness. It is as if he intuitively guesses that he'll win again today.

    "It's true that paragliding throws together some strange personalities. In fact, I have no idea what I, a star of such caliber, am doing amongst you.", philosophises the slightly pessimistically inclined Marcel Konecny on the way up and this is before he had any idea that someone has sat on his backpack and crushed his expensive, special thermic sunglasses.

    At the briefing on the starting ground at 12 p.m. a 40 kilometer long discipline, over four turning points altogether with a goal by the lake a the village of Sostanj, with a one-hour start window open at 12:30 p.m. is announced.



    A wave of take-offs breaks 8 minutes after the opening of the start window. Ondra Dupal takes off followed immediately by Dusan Kultan. A real race-style, intensely-stressful hell is unleashed. On the uneven surface of the steep starting ground, it is suddenly unpredictably crowded for 70-odd parachutes. There is no shortage of neck breaking falls, wild somersaults, jumping through ropes, often one's own. But even so, finally within 40 minutes all 73 racers are in the air. Yes, 73, that is not a mistake. Petr Dvorak was added to the start list and began competing today. He had evidently, for tactical reasons putting off paying the registration fee, while waiting to see how the weather would develop.

    Catching on isn't free today and a relatively large portion of the crest and valley are in on-again off-again shadow of rapidly-forming cumulous clouds. "Number 20 on a tree to the left of start is O.K.", announces Filip Stary on the organizer's frequency and his dark red canopy glows against the tops of the pines about 40 m east of the starting ground. Most of the other racers meanwhile successfully finish turning the bases at an altitude of 2,000 meters and gradually head out on the route.




    A more dramatic incident though was the accident of one of the Polish racers, who after climbing to the clouds, fell uncontrollably from 3,000 meters, in an un-steerable spiral all way down to the forest. Thanks to the lightning-quick rescue operation of Bahdan Wojkovksy, he was quickly taken by ambulance to the hospital. According to the latest reports the pilot was quite fortunate and didn't break anything, so evidently it's not too serious.

    The wide, shaded area in the valley means a premature landing on the 30th kilometer of the route for a small group of leading racers in which is Ondra Dupal, Michal Orolin and Marcel Konecny. The conditions on the route then get gradually better and the first ones to reach the goal are Milan Michna and Mirek Varvarovsky. Their hunger for points however costs them several hundred meters before the goal line. Evidently a cooler-headed Tomas Brauner turns the deciding 100 meters of altitude more and flies in over the heads of both studs, 50 meters above the goal line for today's victory. In the overall placing for today he takes 1st place, form which he was for a short time involuntarily removed due to the annulment of Friday's discipline.




    Gradually today Radek Becera, Petra Krausova and Matus Skvarka fly in to the goal. The latter Slovak pilot has, however, an incorrect recording of his flight path in his GPS for the area around the second turning point, and , surprisingly, doesn't use a camera for back-up documentation. A penalty therefore immediately takes him down to 67th place in the overall placing.