LONGMONT — Minutes after a competitor smashed his parachute into a floating pylon, plowing him at top speed into the ground, Barb Batsch is trembling as her son Nick swoops from the sky, his canopy rumbling like a helicopter.
“I get nervous every time but after that crash, that put me over the edge,” she said, pointing her camera to the sky. “I shouldn’t be. He is so excellent at this.”
Nick Batsch, a two-time national champion canopy pilot, corkscrews into a 450-degree turn, pulls hard on the canopy’s toggles and reaches a little more than 90 mph as he skims sideways on a man-made pond at the Vance Brand Municipal Airport. Batsch clocks an impressive 2.095 seconds crossing the 70-meter course before furrowing to a stop in a swirl of sand. Speedy, but 2/1,000ths of a second slower than the world record.
“That was fast,” Batsch said, gathering his parachute before trotting back for another drop. “Next time it’ll be faster.”
Speed was on display over the weekend at the Mile-Hi Skydiving Center, where 26 of the world’s top canopy pilots gathered for a sort of parachuting home run derby. The 8-year-old competitive sport of swooping involves expert athletes — most with several thousand jumps under their belt — piloting comforter-sized canopies and spiraling themselves downward to reach the highest speeds possible just above the ground.
Elite exhibition
With Colorado’s thin air and cooperative breezes, the records last weekend fell faster than the plummeting pilots at the invite-only event.
The athletes competed in three disciplines, squeezing in as many drops as possible in speed, distance and accuracy competitions that delivered $2,000 for each record set. For each competition, athletes leaped from about 5,000 feet above the ground — that’s low for a parachute jump — and shortly before reaching the ground they began a 270-degree to 630-degree diving spiral that delivers enough speed for the pilots to swing their bodies at nearly 90 mph at ground level.
In the speed competition, the pilots swing through a 70-meter course and negotiate a 75-degree carve between the entry and exit gate. For distance, the pilots carry that massive speed and sustain their hovering float for more than 550 feet. For accuracy, athletes yank their toggles and veer between pylons and buoys on a small pond while dragging their feet through the water.
At Friday’s distance competition, the second athlete on the course — 2010 U.S. champion Jonathan Tagle — broke the 181-meter world record, reaching more than 195 meters. A few minutes later, Batsch regained his 2010 distance world record with a stunning 222.45-meter jump.
“It’s unforgiving”
Technique is the key to success in swooping, and with brief windows to actually practice those moves, an expert canopy pilot must leap from an airplane thousands of times.
“It takes tons of practice,” said Dave Billings, a Mile-Hi Skydiving instructor who parachuted into Invesco Field at Mile High with former Bronco Shannon Sharpe strapped to his chest. “You really have a short amount of time to get it down. From when you start your turn, you’ve got about four or five seconds.”
In 2006 professional canopy pilot Mariann Kramer, 37, died during a swooping competition at Longmont after her parachute failed. Federal aviation investigators concluded Kramer’s reserve parachute was wet and too small. Last December, 38-year-old Denver skydiver Emily Berkeley died at the Longmont airport while practicing low-altitude swooping maneuvers. In May this year, Berkeley’s teammate on a swooping demonstration team, 27-year-old Brady Kane of Erie, died after a swooping accident at the Fort Morgan Airport.
“Yeah, it’s dangerous, just like any high-speed sport. But really, it’s unforgiving,” said 30-year-old Matt Shull, who works for the Air Force in Cheyenne and sped to a personal best 2.18 seconds on the speed course. “There are a lot of ways to mitigate the risks. I’m a pretty conservative person. I don’t get my kicks from other things. If I want to go fast, I skydive.”
The airborne athletes in Longmont last weekend pushed hard every drop, unleashed from the strategic approach of competitions where methodical consistency harvests medals.
“Everyone here is swinging for the fence every time,” said the aptly named Greg Windmiller, a burly Army sergeant and Airborne Ranger who for the past decade has competed with the Army’s elite Golden Knights parachute team.
Coming into the competition, Windmiller held the world record for speed, a flashing 2.093 seconds across the 70-meter course he set in 2009. That record survived the showdown in Longmont.
“Once you get to a certain speed, even a thousandth of a second is a big deal,” said the 39-year-old, who busted out a skintight fly suit to help grease any extra fractions of a second from his horizontal trajectories across the course. “So many things have to come together perfectly.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
