Local girls make bid for World Champion status
The skydiving world is a little known and more often than not misunderstood sport. For example did you know that we have had the top female skydiving team in the world for the last 7 years?
Formation skydiving is an exciting, fast, hard core sport, that requires an immense amount of time, dedication and determination to get to the top. In the last few years the females in this still mainly male dominated sport have overtaken their male counterparts to become the top performers in this country, with 7 females out of the 15 people standing on the podium at this year’s British Nationals, quite an achievement for an activity that started out as a requirement only for military personnel.
With an increase of people wanting to do more and more daring things these days, tandem and static line skydives are getting more and more popular. All four of these girls became hooked after trying a one time adrenaline packed tandem skydive! Skydiving is a very safe sport, with an increasingly high level of research and technology being applied to the equipment used. It’s a sad fact that you rarely see positive reporting on the sport, despite the incredible achievements of the people who are representing our country and bringing home gold medals on a yearly basis.
Team Bodyflight consists of Liz Mathews who is a former world champion with VMax in 2002, 2003 and 2004, Amanda Kemp former world champion with Airkix in 2006, Sarah Cannon who is current world champion with Bodyflight Storm in 2008, and newcomer Tarn Hollis.
The team have recently started their training for the World Championships due to be held next July in Russia.
The British girls have a lot of work to do before July. Their closest rivals being the French team, who will have been training together for 4 years by the time they come to compete in Russia. The French got bronze to the Brit’s gold at the last Championships held on their own home ground in Mauberge France.
4 way formation skydiving is one of the most popular forms of competition within the skydiving world: it is about speed, accuracy, determination and strength, with the single goal of building as many formations as possible. The discipline is practiced in freefall at speeds reaching 120 mph, and consists of four people performing a series of several formations repeatedly within 35 seconds. The fifth team member of Team Bodyflight, Alan Thompson who is the camera person, films each jump and the footage is then watched by the judges to score the team's performance. It's not about looking pretty in the air or looking good when you land; in the same way as a football team wins a match by scoring the most goals, a 4 way team will win a competition if they correctly build more formations and thus score more points than the other teams.
Posted 24/11/2009