PWC Superfinal, Disentis 2021

Performance Review

Flying in the Superfinal in Disentis is like nothing I’ve ever experienced, the valley works in its own way, the scenery will take your breathe away and the level of flying was the highest I’ve ever experienced.

What an amazing experience it was to be part of the PWCA Superfinal in Disentis. Whilst it wasn’t my best performance in a comp, I sure learned a lot from the place and the pilots, in what was possibly one of the highest level competitions a PWC has ever seen.

The competition didn’t start too well for me. If you’ve been following along on my Instagram or the PWC live coverage then you will know for the first 4 tasks I didn’t make goal. So what happened? 

In paragliding it’s as much a mental game as it is about your skills (like most sports at a high level). After the first two tasks didn’t go to well it really put my head in a bit of a tough place. Part of me felt like throwing it all away and the other part wanted to keep going but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly I was doing wrong or differently here to make an improvement. 

In the third task (the one where many people didn’t make goal or accidentally walked across the line just after landing) I landed 5 meters short of the cylinder after getting drilled by a strong headwind on the final glide from the ESS to the goal. It felt like the longest task just because it was so much work to keep my head in the right place and coming into goal as one of the last pilots and then not even getting my distance points really felt like a kick in the nuts, especially after the first two tasks were basically write offs.

When it came to task 4 I was feeling really demoralised and chose to land halfway through the task after pushing too low to try and win some lead out points to make up for my bad days. I didn’t have the patience to soar up in the weak to non-existent thermals once you got below a certain altitude and even though I hate to be defeated it was the right choice to land safely than keep on flying with my mind not in the right place.

On the morning of task 5, I felt like I really needed a day off but still went up to fly. Due to heavy rain coming from the North earlier than expected, the task was cancelled as we thermalled in the start gaggle before the race even started. All I can say is I was looking forward to my nap more than you know. It turned out that day of rest did me a lot of good.

Task 6, 7 and 8 were the days I made goal but I was still coming in to goal in a place that I was not stoked about. So what was it that made this competition so different and difficult to fly. The first thing is the valley in Disentis doesn’t work like most other places in the world. There are no low saves once you’re below the tree line and there’s not soaring up from the trees back to the peaks either. I can’t say I wasn’t warned but it just didn’t make sense in my mind that it wasn’t possible and I can tell you now that it isn’t.

Once high the scenery is amazing, glaciers, snow covered peaks and rock cliff faces but it’s also really intimidating and this is something I’d never felt before in paragliding either. Because the terrain didn’t let you go low, it often meant taking deep lines over the highest peaks to stay high, diving into rotor to catch boosting thermals and soaring rock cliff faces where there’s no margin for error. This element of feeling intimidated definitely contributed to my poor performance and I was hesitant to take lines the leading gaggle had taken as they looked quite simply, a bit sketchy.

Of course all of this is all relative to the level of the other pilots flying there and this competition had pilots who did not falter once. They chose better lines than me, climbed smarter and took risks I wasn’t willing to take. Of course I can walk away from this competition as the top 89th pilot in the world for paragliding but I can also say I learnt a whole lot that I wasn’t expecting to learn in a sport that never stops teaching and that value I can take to future comps where I hope I can stand on podiums.

Congratulations to all the winners for their excellent performance, it was awesome to fly in such great company and thank you to the organisers and PWC for such a great and well-organised event. And I can’t forget a shout out to my beautiful and intelligent wife, who helped me stay on top of my IG all week and stood by me to take a video of every take-off, you’re the best.