Competition News

With today’s task, the PWC Brazil has started in the rolling hills of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. We are based in the town of Andradas, about 200 km north of Sao Paulo.

A 69.5 km task over 3 turnpoints was set that allowed us to fly with or across today’s notherly winds, which is often an indicator of a fast-paced race with many people in goal. Fortunatly for the Swiss team, our team leader Jörg has just placed second in the Brazilian Championships last week so we have a proven specialist of the Brazilian semi flats (editor’s note: weeeellll…). We held a short Swiss meeting before the task announcement, with critical information that turned out to be very helpful for me.

After some struggles with the life tracking on launch we were again reminded to adhere to the maximum altitude limit of 3049m for this week’s competition. With the Swiss team taking off early (must have been Martin Scheel’s influence :) ) we were all rather well positioned at the start gate at 13:00 local time. The field split up in two gaggles, with the eastern gaggle having a better line to the first turnpoint.

Here i lost sight of the rest of the team and was following Jörg. We were able to form a small escape team of approximately 10 pilots who circled up a different core than the main gaggle. Too bad the leading point formula of the PWC has been changed this year, otherwise our small group would have collected most of them as we were only caught up after half the race distance.

Now it was massive gaggle flying and very important to choose good lines as the leaders were under constant attack from behind. An 8:1 required glide ratio to goal turned out to be not enough for a direct glide into goal, a piece of information that Jörg formulated wisely before the race start.

Dan, Albino, Jörg and me arrived in goal. Unfortunately, Yael got low at the first turnpoint, and couldn’t recover. Emanuelle started well, but fell back in every transition, and in the end landed 7 km short of goal.

The fastest pilots flew the task in just under 2 hours, and the next 50 arrived within 3 minutes. Dan was the fastest Swiss but seems to have climbed a bit too high before the start. We’ll see if handing in his own instruments will reduce the penalty tomorrow. The provisional ranking for task 1:
1. Chigwon Won (KOR), 997
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28. Philipp Bethge (SUI), 967
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35. Franz Schilter (SUI/PER), 963
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42. Jörg Ewald (SUI), 959
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62. Albino Malli (SUI), 923
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100. Dan Morand (SUI), 537 (Penalty: 431)
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106. Emanuelle Zufferey (SUI), 397
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112. Yael Margelisch (SUI), 118

The forecast looks good for the coming days and promises ample time for racing hot paragliders around the Brazilian skies, we are happy to be here, and are looking forward to the next days!

Photos on the ground: Zenilson Rocha