On Thu, 03 Jul 2014 13:18:36 -0700, ND wrote:

On Tuesday, August 17, 2004 9:33:12 PM UTC-4, CLewis95 wrote:
While soaring is a sport, and it is competitive, I have a real hard
time viewing the participants as athletes. If you can sit in a lounge
chair for hours on end, playing Nintendo with a joystick, you've got
the athletic stamina and dexterity to be a gold medal soaring pilot.

I don't think you will get a single serious racing pilot in the world
to agree with this assessment.

Curt Lewis - 95 USA

agreed!

Getting your head around what Sports Administrators consider to be a
sport can be hard. I was heavily involved in competitive Free Flight
model flying when we were getting airsports recognised by the UK Sports
Council (its been a good deal for gliding too, but I digress).

The SAs were unconvinced that Free Flight was a sport (during each of the
seven one hour round in a day you make a flight, which usually involves
lobbing it up in a wind, following it downwind, retrieving it from
anything up to two miles away and getting back in time to fly again in
the next round. There's a scoring limit of 3 minutes of these flights.
Then, if more than one flyer has a perfect score, they get to do more
flights that evening with the scoring times increasing for each flyoff
until there is a winner. The SA view was that there was little sporting
prowess involved in getting the model trimmed, lift picking or launching
into lift and that the effort involved in retrieving models after each
flight was irrelevant to the sporting performance.

However, they were more than happy to agree that standing and twiddling
the sticks on an RC transmitter or spinning on the spot while controlling
a control line model were obviously worthy sporting skills.

On that basis I'd say that piloting a glider is most definitely a sport.


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martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
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