Ashley Crick's Freestyle & Skysurf Notes

Wednesday 20th October

This morning began much as yesterday. Not a cloud in the sky and not a single degree warmer. The atmosphere is much more relaxed as most teams seem to be treating the official practice day casually. The general feeling is that if "you are not ready now, you will never be ready". The freestyle and skysurf teams will today be nominating and submitting one of their jumps to the judges for scoring. If the team chooses to submit a compulsory round, it will be scored in full and posted on the scoreboard. If the team however chooses to submit a free round, only the difficulty portion of the jump will be scored and posted. There seems to be an even split in the choice of free and compulsory rounds.

There have been no weather holds today but the number of competitors wishing to jump means that there are regular waits of around one and a half hours for a load. Talking to many of the freestyle and skysurf competitors, it is now very evident that everybody is now in competition mode.

The scores from the official practice jump are published and the best of the compulsory rounds are being scored in the mid to high 80s (out of a possible 100). The difficulty scores arising from the free practice jumps are ranging from 10 to 25 (out of a possible 25).

Tomorrow the competition begins; not soon enough for the 50 freestyle and skysurfing teams who have trained for 12 months in anticipation of the next few days.

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