Longmont – Jay Moledzki is falling, and fast.
With only 1,200 feet between him and the ground, the 32-year-old’s parachute is beneath him, defying the traditional benefits of the nylon canopy. Seconds before a splattering impact, he deftly maneuvers beneath the parachute, converting a hungry gravitational pull into lateral motion.
Flying 5 feet above a shallow pond, he’s screaming along at more than 90 mph. He sails at least 678 feet before grinding his backside to a skidding stop in gravel.
He has just set the world distance record, shattering his previous record of 522 feet and establishing Colorado as the hot new proving ground for the sport of swooping.
It’s also called canopy piloting, an offshoot of skydiving that incorporates the speed of freefall, the cord-pulling finesse of kite surfing and the soaring of paragliding.
Swoopers use canopies that are one-half or less the size of traditional parachutes to fly inches above the ground at speeds that would set police radar guns buzzing.
“This right here is the ragged edge,” said Jim Slaton, one of the country’s original swoopers who founded the Pro Swooping Tour and the World Swooping Association to provide venues for his daredevil ilk.
“Swooping is described as the Blue Angels meets NASCAR,” Slaton said. “This is the most exhilarating and dangerous edge of skydiving. It is the most extreme nonmotorized aerial sport out there.”
Dozens of the world’s best swoopers are in Longmont this week for the Go Fast Canopy Pilot Challenge at the Mile-Hi Skydiving Center. The swooping mavericks at Mile-Hi Skydiving spent several months building a 70,000-square-foot pond – the largest swoop-specific in the country – to host the week-long event.
It’s the first time a major swooping contest has landed in Colorado, and the high-altitude conditions that make baseballs at Coors Field fly farther works on swooper bodies too. They fly farther and faster.
“This may be the place to come set records,” said Florida-based Moledzki, whose first world-record-setting jump of 619 feet lasted only long enough for him to try again Thursday afternoon.
In the past decade, just about every gravity-fueled sport has seen rapid evolution and progression. Skiers fly off monster cliffs long deemed unskiable. Mountain bikers pedal off similar cliffs. Kayakers, snowboarders, rock climbers and all hosts of other thrill-seekers have pushed their sports to new extremes. Now, it’s the skydivers’ turn.
Barely 5 years old, competitive swooping adds a riskier dimension to the 80-year-old sport of skydiving, as if leaping from an airplane and plummeting earthward at more than 100 mph were not scary enough, but for experts who have logged several thousand jumps, the initial electrifying spark of freefall and skydiving in general can drift toward the routine.
“When you are coming in fast, your body thinks you are going to hit the ground and die,” said Chris Hayes, a 36-year-old professional swooper who tests new canopies for Florida’s Performance Designs, one of the largest canopy makers in the world.
“It is such a rush. The adrenaline is just incredible. You are out of breath, and you feel it through your whole body,” Hayes said.
There’s a good reason a swooper’s deepest instincts reflect on death. Swoopers are killed at a rate of three or four a year, which isn’t staggering except when considering there are fewer than 200 professional swoopers in the world.
In comparison, 21 skydiving fatalities were reported nationwide in 2004, but more than 2.4 million skydivers jumped from planes, according to the U.S. Parachute Association.
The kind of minute miscalculation that makes golfers shank can end the life of a swooper. Swoopers actually maneuver their canopies to accelerate as they reach the elevation where traditional skydivers slow to an ambling float.
The competitive swoopers even wear up to 40-pound lead vests and belts that add to the plunging speed.
To add to their buzz, swoopers do things like touch the ground at 70 mph before skimming a toe across a 370-foot pond. They spin around their canopies dragging hips in the water at 60 mph. They let go of their canopy toggles and appear to walk on water. They fly face first with their chins an inch off a 3-foot-deep pond. They leave little to no room for error while toying with death.
John Schlosser could hear his Army jump master screaming, “What are you doing!” while he watched the dawning of a new death-defying sport.
“I’m an old Army Ranger, and this is way different than what we used to do,” said the Longmont local who came out Thursday to see the swoop carnival.
“Way, way different.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
