Past and Future of our sport

By Jim Slaton

We first need to understand where we came from before we can try and predict our future. The sport has come along way since 1996 when Reggie Estaugh and USPA president BJ Worth organized the first Bladerunning event in Montana. It was later that same year that a group of skydivers

in Gardiner, NY organized the first pond swooping meet at Skydive the Ranch. Nothing has been the same since. Reggie later formed the Pro Blade Association with occasional meets while the annual Pond Swooping Nationals continued on. Then came along Jim Slaton and Lyle Presse in the late 90s both organizing their own versions of swoop competitions called the Para-Performance Games and the Pro Sky Swoop Tour. The two later joined forces and in 2003 created the Pro Swooping Tour.

Later that same year they pitched the new sport of “Canopy Piloting” to the International Parachuting Committee at the 54th annual meeting Brazil. The IPC accepted and the two organized the 1st World Cup of Canopy Piloting in 2003 and the 1st U.S. Nationals of Canopy Piloting in 2004. The sport has been hard on all of the organizers as they slowly fell out one by one. This is mostly due to the fact that it is a thankless job with little or no money in it which starts to consume your life 24/7 365 days a year.

Usually when the events start to cost the organizer money and they can no longer break even they let it go. Some stay in for a longer haul “hoping” that are luck will change and we will finally get the audience we so desperately need. In 2005 the sport grew large enough to create an amateur league to help feed the Pro Swooping Tour and help build the sport into what it is today.

The sport has come along way in the past 11 years but really didn’t get recognized as a sport until 2003. Prior to these swoop competitions there were very little skydiving events that had large cash purses (if any). Canopy piloting has been fortunate enough to attract a variety of sponsors through the years but keeping them would prove to be the hardest task. We have a variety of industry wide sponsors and several corporate sponsors like RedBull, Hanson’s, Nike and GoFast! Sports but none of these “big” sponsors carried us for more than one year.

Looking at the sport from an attractive sponsorship prospective then canopy piloting was born in 2003 and peaked that same year. In a single year there were over 15 competitions worldwide with the PST organizing the 1st Swoop Festival in Panama City Beach Florida at America’s largest nightclub. Also that year the PST held events in Norway, Baja Mexico and California. In that same year we had sponsors RedBull & GoFast! Sports just to name a few. The Sponsors began to fall off the following year as the “excitement” and “craziness” of the sport began to fade in the public eye. 

The “brand” and the event (a.k.a. swooping) got diluted with swoop competitions popping up everywhere and are athletes getting a “death wish” label by the general public. Extreme has become mainstream with the success of events like the EXPN’s “X-Games” and the “Gravity Games”. Yes, skydiving got it’s chance at the X-games and not just once but twice. 

Skysurfing was a successful event on EXPN that ran a few years before it was cut from the games. Have you ever heard of the “SSI Pro Tour”? Freeflying also got their chance at the games through trials but neither would survive on TV and not because people didn’t like to watch. The cash purse for skysurfing at the X Games topped out at $66,000 in the year 2000.

That’s right, the TV ratings for Skysurfing was up but the sponsorship opportunities were lacking. See unless the sponsor could get brand exposure with their logos on the skysurfers board or on their flight suit there were no other opportunities.

Unlike BMX, motocross, skiing and such were there are course markers that act as billboards; backdrops, banner space and much such skydiving had no such course or backdrop. To make things worse the face of skysurfing “Rob Harris” died just when the sport was peaking. Rob was the man and when a camera was stuck in his face he really shinned.

He not only became an X game champion but he won a Grammy with his cameraman Joe Jennings. He was a clean-cut professional kid that always said the right things at the right time raising the sport to a new level every time he opened his mouth. The sport lost a great person when Rob died and we should all learn a little from him at his website www.robharris.org 

Skysurfing was eventually replaced by downhill BMX dirt jumping at the X games. Canopy piloting (a.k.a swooping) could fill this gap perfectly and this is one of the many reasons I have stuck with this sport for 15 years now. In fact, canopy piloting is one of very few sports that could take place in both the winter and summer games.

It could be on the lake or beach events in the summer and on the same downhill slalom course as the snowboarders or skiers in the winter. Why then haven’t we got into the action yet you ask? There are a variety of reasons but mostly because the networks have a bad taste in their mouth when they hear  “skydiving”.

They have been down this road before and the network is finished negotiating (fighting) with the sponsors to get them to pay a premium price for skydiving’s “air time”. So when they hear another pitch or proposal about a new skydiving event they immediately shut the door saying no sponsors will stand behind another skydiving event.

Skydiving it seems it considered by the general public as too extreme to be mainstream extreme....understand?  With the death of Skysurfing at the X-Games it is obviously apparent that skydiving’s last chance to become mainstream may very well rest in the hands of canopy piloting.

This is one of the reasons why organizations like the IPC are willing to stand behind us. There are drop zones that still ban swooping and the term “hook turns” has become synonymous with a reckless parachute pilot with a death wish. Even now large DZs like Eloy Arizona and Deland in Florida are banning “hook turns” with no turns (rotations) larger than 180 degrees.

Common people, this is 2007 for god sake! With all the resources and talented folks around these days can we not educated these people? To many of these DZs “swooping” translates into increased liability issues, more problems and the likely chance they could get a bad name when things go wrong. 

When it comes to the networks we are having more success selling ourselves as “Parachutists” and not “skydivers”. Yes we mostly use aircrafts but that limits the sport and we all know its far more than that. Keep in mind that Bladerunning started the whole rage and when the weather went bad and the helicopter couldn’t fly guess what they guys started doing? We need to be open-minded and always be reinvent ourselves as a sport. 

The quest to get swooping accepted in the public eye and on TV is a long road and the learning curve is high. Among other things the process damn near requires a degree in Marketing and project management just to name a few. Getting swooping into the mainstream is a catch 22 because you need a corporate sponsor to get steady TV time but you need steady TV time to get a corporate sponsor.

To complicate things further our sport is young and many companies our nervous to put their name (brand) on the line at an event where there is a high probability that an athlete could get seriously injured or die on National TV laying next to an airblade with their logo on it. Yes, there are other dangerous sports like NASCAR, Air Races, motocross or Skiing but those are already mainstream sports with a structured association and governing body that society considers “normal” involving a “calculated risk”. 

See, in the end we (as skydivers) are our worst enemies. No matter what we have tried we have not yet been able to brake society’s perception that skydivers and especially swoopers are reckless lunatics with a death wish. The majority of skydivers don’t carry themselves well in the public eye and don’t really care. 

They don’t know how to act or what to say when put on national TV with a broadcast video camera is shoved in their face.  Sponsored athletes in other mainstream sports are assigned agents and sent to classes with seminars where they learn how to act and what to say in the public eye. Sponsorship is pretty straightforward but fairly complicated at the corporate level.

Basically corporations want to sponsor events or athletes, which they feel, can promote their brand and get the most “impressions” for the dollar. The sponsor wants the sponsored to attach their brand to all spectators, fans and ultimately the end users through this process known as “the brand extension”.

The more people that see the brand (product or service) is the more “impressions” the event makes. Without a doubt one gains the most impressions through TV time and in a close second is all the other media outlets like Internet, radio, publications, DVDs and such. Without access to these big outlets it’s hard to make the impressions we really need.

Yes, skydiving and swooping has been in TV commercials, TV shows and in publications but never on a regular basis and never delivered in a show format for Television. Again, we are usually presented as crazy lunatics with a death wish not professionals in an organized sport. In order to break this stereotype we all have to work together and take ourselves serious because if we don’t who else will?  

Then we have to consider the overall cost of a swoop competition with the added expense of the large cash purses we set early on in the sport. Around 2002 we had multiple events with a $20,000 cash purse, which raised the standard to a level not seen in the skydiving industry before. The overall cost of a swoop competition varies depending on the circumstances but large events like the PST & CPC championships can cost thousands of dollars to organize.

Many people (swoopers /spectators) have no idea how much an event like this takes to run but it can easily cost $20,000 to $30,000. Yes, twenty to thirty thousand dollars. At the recent PST champions ships the budget was just that with not only $10,000 going out to the competitors for the cash purse but thousands more going to rent bleachers, packing tents, announcer booth, porta johns, PA system, merchandise and more.

The event sponsor’s have to be able to substantiate their investment and get their sponsorship dollars back in exposure or frankly its just not good business. To make things worse you usually need a signed contract from a network guarantying TV time before you can consider a corporate sponsor. This is why most swooping sponsorships have been predominately DZs and companies within the skydiving industry.

If you don’t have any TV time then you need exposure on the Internet and in magazines with a HUGE following like Sports Illustrated and Time magazine. You also need a large crowd of spectators measured in tens of thousands, not hundreds. 

So consider this, if the PST organizes an event costing between $15-30,000 and we have no guaranteed TV time or coverage in major publications how does the sponsor get their investment back?  Yes, maybe the event gets a feature article in Parachutists and other skydiving publications like Skydiving magazine. Maybe we get coverage in a local newspaper, maybe something on the 6:00pm local news station or maybe there are a few hundred spectators at the event.

On this topic we have had events at bigger venues in the past (like Panama City Beach at Americas largest nightclub) but this doesn’t guarantee TV time (which we did not get) and these events cost even more to organize than the ones on a DZ. Truthfully, the ones benefiting the most from the modern swoop competition considering most happen on a DZ is the sponsors within the skydiving industry.

Again, swoop meets off DZs at high visibility venues are really expensive with additional permits, aircraft ferry fees and more. To give you an idea of just how much it cost, the 2002 Bladerunning event that Reggie and me organized at Elk Meadows Ski resort in Utah had a budget of $100,000.00 for one single event.

As far as I know Performance Designs and Sunpath products are the largest companies within our industry but neither of them are rushing to spend $15-30,000 to sponsor the next large swoop competition. They also have no motive or interest in paying more money to put the meet into a public venue because frankly it’s not their market (the DZs are). Sure we can probably get one of these companies to do one event a year but let’s see if a skydiving company will sponsor a series of big events each year with let’s say 3-4 large cash purses and typical $5,000-$10,000 cash purse.

Remember, the $10,000 cash purse is just the prize money and none of it can be used to run the event. Why aren’t these companies rushing to sponsor the next big competition? There are a variety of reasons but why would they when for the same money they could run a whole Ad campaign in Parachutist magazine or sponsor their own swoopers/Team?  In the end its a tough business and its getting harder each day with the increased prices in fuel causing jump price to rise, etc. It’s now harder than ever to get sponsorship and most that do don’t know how to take care of their sponsor.

I hear this complaint from skydiving companies all the time saying, “once these guys get the sponsorship and receive their gear they forget all about us". This makes it even harder on everyone else to get sponsorship in the future. If our athletes don’t know how to take care of a small skydiving sponsor how can they handle a fortune 500 company?

To make things worse most skydiving companies do business on “handshakes” with nothing in writing. This causes confusing in a sponsorship relationship and it is difficult to know what is expected of you. In the end and without a contract both parties could end up pointing fingers at each other dissatisfied. 

Many of the top swoopers now make their decision on which swoop meets they will attend based off the amount of cash purse at each competition. Have you noticed that the National of canopy piloting has more competitors if it is at the same location as the rest of the event? Hey, who wants to go through the expense of going to a swoop meet with no cash purse? Just look at last year’s nationals, which were held in a public venue on a boardwalk in NJ with only 8-10 competitors but this year at Skydive Chicago they have 25.

With the rising cost of skydiving and the possibility of fewer cash purses in the future what will the participation be? Hopefully I will be wrong but most likely swooping will end up the same way it started, with swoopers competing for only a medal and some bragging rights. In the early years of swooping (1996-2000) there was no schedule of swoop meets that came out pilots could get excited about and schedule their time off. Swoop meets were random and everyone just hoped this event came around and they had some money to win. It was common to only have 1-2 events a year.

Back then you could only really count on “the Ranch” in NY with their annual event, which had the best model for that era. They took on as many sponsors as they could which gave certificated for free gear or discounted gear. The organizers would then raffle off the goods for the cause to raise the biggest cash purse possible. This had great results for many years with each year getting better then the next because everyone wanted the ranch to have the biggest cash purse ever. I do believe that they did have the biggest cash purse ever with $20,000 plus dollars on the line but as quick as it came it went and the market eventually got saturated with too many swoop meets…. Sorry Sonic.

On that note I have to say that Reggie Eastaugh was also correct was back in the day. He said that once we present the sport of canopy piloting to the IPC and they accept they will no doubt change it in ways not productive with the sport and they will make decisions without seeking the guidance of the experienced organizers…..he was right. With all that being said it could all very easily go the other way and the sport could get a break. We could gain a corporate sponsor, get a TV contract and move to the next level.  If we get our chance will we be ready? What will happen? I could get lengthy here but I’ll try to keep it short. 

If the sport gets a corporate entity to sponsor a season of competitions then we would no doubt get a TV contract. When the tour signs the development deal with the sponsor then the tour would then move on to sign a deal with the network. This could happen in either order but one will follow the other. The tour with contracts in hand would then produce documents for our canopy pilot’s (swooper athletes) confirming that the tour has TV time and the dates the competitions will be aired.

The document would also outline how long each pilot has been on the tour, what the current rank is and competition history. With this document the athlete can then go out and seek a sports agent from an appropriate agency. The top canopy pilots (top ten) would be certain to gain some type of corporate sponsorship with the guaranteed airtime on TV. The agent would evaluate everything about that pilot and determine what their worth is to a corporate sponsor. This is where it is every man for himself and even though the higher rank positions are worth more it doesn’t always mean they will get more.

Your sportsmanship along with how you look, carry yourself, talk and walk will all go a long way here. The bigger and better agencies will send their athletes to coaching seminars where they will learn how to act in front of a camera, walk, talk and take care of their sponsor. The corporate sponsor will also have a laundry list of things they will require from the sponsored athlete and believe it or not winning is not #1 on that list.

Winning is high on the list but not #1. I know this because not only have I talked with guys like Tony Hawk and Travis Prastrana about it but also the WPST has an agency that represents us. Most sponsors just want you to fly their colors everywhere you can and stick their logo in everyone’s face (gorilla marketing) but some do not want that and take a much laid back stance.

These companies care more about you extending their brand to your fans and spectators. They want your fans to drink coke because you drink coke and not because you’re sticking it in everyone’s face saying, “drink coke”! I could talk for hours on this subject but I think you get the point. One last note, the only professional swooper I ever knew to have a corporate sponsor and a sports agent was Team Extreme’s own Luigi Cani. If there is a skydiver that knows about taking care of his sponsor its this guy. Yahoo sent him to classes early on and helped him not only with his English but how to act in front of a camera and with the media.

Luigi’s sponsor Yahoo! Was instrumental in some of Team Extreme’s early projects including “Out of the Blue”. Remember the big Yahoo! logos on the side of the helicopter?  They got involved because Luigi had a good track record with the media and they new the project was going to land on TV, newspapers, magazines and eventually DVD…..which it did. 

Preparation, education and experience will be key to our success and we must continue to evolve as a sport.  We have to put aside what “we want” and give the sponsors and spectators what “they want”. We have to refine our existing events and make new ones. First came the speed event followed by the Distance and then Accuracy event. Raw Freestyle has been around since the beginning but it wasn’t structured with defined moves until 2004. Freestyle was the first swooping event to include a pilot’s “approach” as part of the total score.

There were a variety of reasons why we did this but one of them was to get swoopers used to being scored in the air. There is a method to my madness. I created the team speed event a few years before the Freestyle event. I made sure to add an “approach” score to the Freestyle event in order to get everyone used to being scored on not just what they did on landing but also what they did in the air.  In 2004 I was already setting the stage for swooping’s next big event called “Parabatics”. 

I’ve always known we need to get as many eyeballs as possible watching us but unfortunately I had to wait for the sport to catch up with the ideas in order for most of this to turn into reality.  This is the same thing most of the parachute companies are doing with parachute designs.  Most of the designs we fly today were built a decade ago. In fact, when NZ Aerosports (Jyro) built the FX in 1996 they also built the VX but didn’t tell anyone. At the PIA Symposium in 1999 PD came out with a new canopy called the “Velocity”.

As soon as they put the first model on display at their booth Jyro walked to his car in the parking lot and brought back the flyers for the nine cell, 27 chamber VX Extreme and nothing has ever been the same. The Velocity and the VX came out the same day in 1999. Thus the Icarus canopies motto “One step ahead”.  On that note, whether you think Icarus is better than PD or Daedalus canopies is better than them all one thing is for certain. If we all had to fly the same canopy it would get boring.

Image if we all had to drive the same car or wear the same clothes. Also, if these companies and their designers weren’t pushing each other we wouldn’t get these great new designs. The way I see it if NZ Aerosports hadn’t built the first “mach 1” in the early 90s (later called the FX) we would all still be flying some form of a super stiletto! On that same topic if it wasn’t for Parachutes De France coming out with the “Blue Trac” (the first ZP elliptical canopy) we might not even be talking about this stuff right now!

Back to the discussion I had to build the pro tour before the amateur tour and the sport went through 7-8 events over 11 years to get where we are now.  Spectators love demo routines, which have got us the most exposure and has been the most successful canopy piloting activity worldwide thus far. If we make a popular demo routine into a competition then we have a winner.

Also taking in account that the team and Freestyle events are the most spectators friendly meets. When Team Extreme started doing team swoops and synchronized landings there were few others trying this with cross-braced canopies and even fewer doing it through course. We had to help people and give demos on how we to do it.

In order to keep our events safe and professional looking we have to evolve into these new events without throwing pilots into a bad situation, especially at a live event with the pressures of everyone watching. We have been doing team speed since 2001 and Freestyle since 2004. Now if we can make the competition have the feel of a demo then we could stand to attract even more spectators. 

The time between rounds is a killer for spectators and the viewers at home. Waiting on these canopies flying around the sky holding in brakes for each other is another showstopper. Image an event like Parabatics where a two-man team exits at 6,000 feet and does a planned routine of maneuvers from a list of defined moves like the freestyle event. These moves could include both contact and non-contact CRW but mainly close proximity flying. It would start with simple moves like carousals or over and under with top docks and side by sides.

Then after an aerial display of parabatics the team falls back into a tight formation and does a synchronized swoop through a course. This aerial display of parabatics can be judged from the ground with a scope just like “Style & Accuracy” has been for 50 years. We already have the equipment to do this type of event now. So in Parabatics the team is scored on the routine, approach, execution & landing. Does any of this sound familiar? As a spectator or viewer at home it is non-stop action just like going to an airshow.

Sponsors get excited when they hear this concept but again we have to wait for the sport to catch up with the ideas. Consider this, the first factory swoop team (within the skydiving industry) was Team Extreme formed in 1999 and the original team broke up at the end of 2003 which was the first year that PD decided to put a team together. Precision Aerodynamics had a team but it was hit and miss which was more like some precision’s sponsored guys teaming up to do competitions together.

Since then we have added Team Fastrax but no other significant teams since. I still feel that a team must train together, travel together, compete and work together to be a team, not just a group with matching jumpsuits. The bottom line is that it has been eight years and we still only have 4-5 teams in North America. However, more international teams are being formed with the German and Portuguese teams getting JVXs this year. 

The gear will also improve with more advanced parachutes and harnesses in the future. Again, we can only move forward is fast as our pilot’s experience and the issue of money comes up again. Think about it, why would a parachute company be in a hurry to spent tens of thousands of dollars on research and development of the next big swoop canopy when there is only a few hundred potential customers? The same also applies to parachute harnesses.

Just like there are already better parachutes out there waiting there are also already better harnesses and equipment but canopy piloting is only a small part of skydiving as a whole which is not that big itself. Slowly but surely we will start to see more advanced equipment that will allow us to fly in ways we are only now starting to explore. This is something we can all look forward to in the coming years. So to summarize this discussion the sport has come along way but there are still miles to travel.

As canopy pilots we should all be caring ourselves as if we have already made it into the mainstream and prepare ourselves for that day when it comes. The teams of designers and their factory pilots are always out there conducting R&D while pushing the limits of the ram air canopy. We are proudly moving forward like we have always done creating new ways to reach sponsors and our target audience.

As long as there is a will there is a way and no matter if you fly a PD product, Precision, Icarus or Daedalus we are all in this together. Two heads will always be better than one and we all need to join forces and have one single voice.  If you remember nothing else about the golden years of swooping remember this, I gave it my all….24/7 365