Top of the Stack

“It was my worst day in the air for sure,” recalls Maxime Pinot, looking back to the sixth day of the 2023 Red Bull X-Alps when a north föhn tore through the Dolomites. Outside competition, no pilot would dream of flying in such conditions. “Only in X-Alps,” Max reflects. It was manageable to begin with he recalls, but then it picked up after the Cima Tosa turnpoint and they crossed the Val d’Adige, the massive north-south running valley that runs from Merano to Trento. 

“When you are looking at your instrument and it’s saying the wind is over 40km/h it really starts to be a lot, because you never see this when flying by yourself.” 

“I was already tired from the competition,” he continues. “I saw Damien [Lacaze] not being able to escape a narrow valley, he was going forwards backwards, forwards backwards. He spent one hour trying to land. 

“I succeeded in jumping over this narrow valley. I remember doing one more climb and just trying to enter a valley, and that’s where the shit happened, because in this valley it was really windy. I decided it was too dangerous and I had to land. I found some fields, but I was going backwards so fast that I had to choose three fields in a row that I couldn’t reach. In the end, I had to go on the lee side of the mountain to stop going backwards.”

Such was the mental stress of flying in similar conditions that after landing, the Austrian athlete Paul Guschlbauer would simply turn off his phone, curl up and go to sleep. 

“It was really awful,” Max adds. “Nothing really bad happened,...