Racing Takes to the Air
Rob / 29.01.2003
The Four Winds organisation in the US claim to be the only adventure sports company in the world racing over land, air and water in a single event in 2003, but the new Réunion d\'Aventures race organised by Gerard Fusil is also introducing paragliding, though it is an optional part of the course.
Four Winds run a variety of races and say they are the ‘longest running multi-day adventure racing company on US soil’. Their premier event is the ‘USA Supreme Adventure Race’ which will be held from August 13-21 in Utah this year. It’s a big race in every way , a 7 day, 400 mile expedition-level race and this year they’ve added ‘powered parachuting’ into it. It’s like a micro-light but under a parachute, and is said to be very safe and easy to learn, which it will need to be. It sounds like great fun though the idea of introducing mechanically powered propulsion is a bit of a compromise in an expedition adventure race.
There will be no motors on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion – somehow you can’t see Gerard Fusil standing for that, but obviously paragliding isn’t something all teams in this new race will be able to do. It takes place from April 27th to May 2nd and their website has just been updated in English. Reunion is a great place to fly, it rises steeply out of the ocean and you can jump off sheer cliffs into vast canyons and cirques but I wonder how support crews will cope with this one – teams will get down the mountain a lot faster than they can!
There is, of course, very little that is genuinely new, and the first ever Western Isles Challenge in 1994 (a sort of pre Hebridean Challenge in the Scottish Isles) was a groundbreaking event which allowed teams to go from checkpoint to checkpoint by whatever non-motorised means they chose - and not on a fixed route either! It happened a while ago now, but I think paragliding was used by at least one team as an option there. In a race of such ‘pure’ AR principles they did of course have to carry it up the mountain themselves!
[The Dolomitenmann has some spectacular paragliding too but that\'s a team realy with specialist flyers.]
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