Longmont – For the typical adrenaline addict, letting go of an airplane at 5,000 feet usually does the trick. For the dozens of professional “swoopers” in Longmont over the weekend for the second Pro Swooping Tour (PST) stop at the Mile-Hi Skydiving Center, it’s just the beginning.
The tricks come later. They come in the form of the “No-Handed Lay-Z-Boy,” or the “Tick Jockey.” They come at more than 90 mph. And they come dangerously close to terra firma, where swooping canopy pilots relish in the intoxicating combination of all the elements.
“It’s definitely not for the timid,” said T.J. Landgren, Mile-Hi Skydiving’s resident instructor, considered by many to be the world’s best freestyle swooper.
“Swoopers are a subculture within another subculture,” added Justin Thornton, Mile-Hi’s unofficial director of swoop and the man most responsible for putting Colorado on the swooping radar by bringing the PST to Longmont last year. This year, the tour visits twice – last weekend’s $20,000 Mile-Hi Canopy Piloting Cup, and the somewhat less lucrative PST Swoop Festival on July 21-23.
But let’s get one thing clear right up front: Swoopers (a.k.a. canopy pilots) are in it for the action, not the money.
“It’s definitely an adrenaline-pumping sport,” said Karen “Kaz” Sheekey, a native Australian living near Jacksonville, Fla. “It’s such a buzz. So much more of a buzz than the free fall to me.”
The sport of swooping, or canopy piloting, is significantly more involved than a mere skydive. Unlike the free-fall portion of skydiving that occurs upward of 10,000 feet from the ground, the objective of the swoop is to fly a small parachute (about 90 square feet is standard) as close to the ground as possible. The precision maneuver begins several hundred feet above ground with an aggressive spiral turn ranging anywhere from 270 degrees to 1,020 degrees, initiated to generate speed as the canopy plummets. The more aggressive the spiral, the more speed is generated – and the more difficult it becomes to judge and control the approach as pilots arc their turn into the landing zone.
“Swooping adds an extra element of danger, speed and precision,” Thornton said. “It relates to the public more as a sport. They used to do ‘sky surfing’ at the X Games, but no one could see what was going on up there. Swooping brought the canopies and the action down to the ground.”
Sheekey, the PST’s top-ranked female since the tour’s origin in 2003, came to the discipline after an eight- year career as a skydiving photo- grapher and videographer, where she grew accustomed to racing clients to the ground in order to photograph their landings. With more than 7,000 skydives to her credit, she discovered somewhere along the way that the challenge of flying her parachute – and flying it fast – near earthbound objects ultimately overtook the stoke of simply falling from an airplane.
“The first 100 jumps, (the free fall) is the big rush. Oh, yeah. It’s pretty scary,” Sheekey said. “But the rush I still get when I’m coming in (while swooping) is incomparable. After my first round (of competition Friday), I was shaking. But not shaking with fear – shaking with nervous energy that just runs through your body like an adrenaline shot. There’s no feeling really quite like that.”
Speed requires safety
Competitive swooping is based on four elements: speed, distance, accuracy and the most recent addition, freestyle. There also is a team speed event, in which two pilots attempt to synchronize their flight across a 220-foot course and are scored on their combined time.
For safety, most contests take place over water, and Mile-Hi invested $80,000 to build the nation’s largest swooping pond last year. The move has attracted several of the world’s best canopy pilots, like Sheekey, optimizing Colorado’s thinner air to push the sport to new levels.
Sheekey’s relative longevity in such a young sport has united with her passion to breed its share of success. In 2005, she not only was the top female competitor on the PST, but the second-ranked competitor overall, finishing in the four-event points total behind only Francisco Neri among 43 ranked competitors.
The key, Sheekey says, is moving at her own pace – seemingly a difficult task in a sport where pilots have been clocked skimming across the pond at 94 mph.
“I don’t go as hard as some men would go. I’m pretty careful. I just like to go in baby steps,” she said. “I definitely train differently than the men do. I just don’t try things until I know I’m ready. I don’t want to hurt myself. I don’t like pain.”
And pain is an ever-present possibility in Sheekey’s sport of preference. Although her lone swooping injury was a hyperextended knee a few years ago while doing a freestyle maneuver over water, spectators at the Mile-Hi Canopy Cup watched in horror as competitor Eldon Burrier of Seattle took a hard, fast crash into the 3 1/2 feet-deep pond during Friday night’s team speed competition. Although he shrugged off the spectacular crash and walked away with little more than a bruise, observers understood that the result might easily have been more tragic.
“That was a scary one,” Thornton said afterward.
“He’s lucky,” added Justin Carmody, who works for canopy manufacturer Performance Designs. “If he’d hit the ground, he’d be dead.”
Altitude helps sport soar
The morbid statement is far from exaggeration. Historically, swoopers are killed at a rate of three or four per year. While the figure may seem statistically underwhelming, consider there are fewer than 150 professional swoopers registered with the PST in 2006. And they all understand the potential for catastrophe resulting from even the slightest miscalculation.
“It takes a lot of practice, typically between 600 and 1,000 jumps before you begin swooping,” Thornton said. “People try earlier than that, but they generally wind up hurting themselves.”
And, of course, competition takes the sport to an entirely different level, especially in the thin air of Colorado. Last year at Mile-Hi, the swooping world record for horizontal distance flying was shattered when Jay Moledzki of Toronto flew his canopy for 206.85 meters (678.64 feet), all of them less than 5 feet off the ground.
“I’d never jumped at this altitude before this week, but the first thing I noticed was how clean the air was, how your canopy dives so much more than when you’re at sea level, where I normally jump,” Sheekey said. “It’s definitely faster here.”
Less than optimal wind and weather conditions during competition Friday and Saturday held world records in check at Mile-Hi, but it certainly didn’t diminish the competitive spirit. Jeff Provenzano won the competition, beating Landgren on the final freestyle jump with a dangerous new maneuver called a “Miracle Man” (a 360-degree turn, landing his parachute with a full twist in the harness). And although Sheekey was forced to settle for seventh place overall, she maintained the respect of her peers.
“There’s always a mental challenge I think in any sport you do. I guess it is a little different because I’m one of the only women competing against all these men,” Sheekey said. “A few years ago it used to concern me a little bit, but now when I come to a competition, I am a competitor, not a female competitor as such.
“The guys now treat me with a lot of respect, whereas before it was, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll show you what to do.’ They used to treat it more like, ‘Oh, that’s cute.’ But now when they see me ranking and doing quite well, it’s definitely more of an even playing field. I get a lot of respect by the men, which I like.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-820-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.