I once interviewed Ozone test pilot and Paragliding World Cup crusher Russell Ogden for the Cloudbase Mayhem podcast. The takeaways and lessons from the talk are too many to list, but there was one thing in particular that really made me think.
I asked Russ what separates the elite pilots like Chrigel Maurer from the rest of us. This is a common question I ask my guests on the show but the answer this time was so obvious it would have never occurred to me, and I’m guessing, to most pilots. In Russ’s own words: “The average intermediate pilot knows just as much as Chrigel knows, he just executes it all better.”
Now before you switch off and murmur “well of course Gavin you idiot!” let’s take a closer look at this statement. Anyone who has watched six-time Red Bull X-Alps champion Chrigel Maurer dominate over the years hears about all the things that make him tick. We hear the stories of the incredible hours he puts in. That he started flying almost a decade before he could legally drive. That he’s as solid in acro as he is at crushing out 300km triangles. That he flies in howling winds above snow just to learn how much wind he can deal with safely.
If you watch him execute move after move after move in the X-Alps you can convince yourself (as I have) that he’s not just insanely good, but actually using some kind of black magic. You can convince yourself (as I have) that he just knows something the rest of us don’t know.
But if you believe Russ is correct and the average cross country pilot knows just as much as Chrigel does then suddenly the playing field looks a lot different. The average cross country pilot understands weather; how thermals are formed; thermal triggers; lee-side dangers and opportunities; how to turn in lift and how to sniff out lifty lines on glide and the million other decisions we make every time we take to the sky.
The difference isn’t knowledge but execution.
To use an analogy, Chrigel is looking at the world with perfect vision while the rest of us are looking at it through the bottom of a beer glass. Where we spend a good deal of time in every flight wondering if we are making the right move, Chrigel has no doubt, or at least less doubt.
Chrigel can no more ‘see’ the lifty line between climbs than you or I can, but he finds it with less hesitation and sticks with it with more authority and confidence. He moves to a better climb faster; he plans farther ahead; he turns on the speed sooner and backs off earlier.
He knows when to survive versus when to push a few seconds before the rest of us do, and those few seconds make all the difference between crushing out huge flights and bombing out early.
Many of you have probably seen the famous video clip of Chrigel launching in an insane amount of wind during the 2014 X-Pyr while another competitor looks on with what is probably a combination of awe and disgust. In this one short clip we can glean that Chrigel has a skill-set that most pilots will never achieve, and the confidence to back it up. But he didn’t get either of those things from knowing more than you or I, he just works at it harder and more diligently.
He is patient when we are rushed. He sees many options where we see none. He has confidence when we have fear. These differences are difficult if not impossible to teach. Executing what we know is a lot easier said than done. Standing your ground with that little doubtful voice in your head can be a real problem while getting pummeled in a valley wind with no landing options.
But paragliding is not rocket science. The fundamentals are the fundamentals. Just as there is no secret to happiness, there is no secret to cross country. We should all find comfort in the basic truth that we know as much as the best pilots in the world know. They just do it better and that my friend is a simple problem to solve.
It’s called training.
This article was published in issue 178 (April 2017).
