Well, that’s putting it lightly. As I look around, it strikes me that the Sonchaux team has singlehandedly reinvented the art of the paragliding show. Let’s start, literally, at the top. The scene on launch is a major part of the experience of paragliding, and letting the audience in on the drama unfolding an hour’s drive up the hill is no small feat. Sonchaux solved the problem. How? Live cameras on launch. Bam. As we watch from below, those cameras are capturing the launch tension, sure, but they’re actually doing far more than that. When I glance over at the monitor, one household-name acro pilot has another in a sloppy half-Nelson, while a stripeshirted referee joins the dogpile in a luchador mask. The launch team behind them is doubled over with laughter. So are several onlookers around me. It’s not just launch that’s being filmed, of course. It’s everything. There are live cameras everywhere: in the crowd, zoomed-in on the landing rafts, and even on my head as I hop out of a helicopter to “rodeo” a wingsuit out over
the harbor. The cameras bring the crowd into unprecedented intimacy with the competitors, the process, the demonstrations and the sweetly Swiss-French environment we’re all playing in. Nicola leads me, clutching my coffee, into the heart of it all: a small video trailer, tucked away in a thicket of colorful vendor tents. The little room, constantly buzzing with staff, bursts with a nest of cables that hugs a desk full of monitors, battery chargers, lenses, control panels and cameras. The show’s director perches in the midst of it, deftly switching between live feeds at a multitude of positions around the comp. A small mountain of smoke cans sits in the corner next to him, waiting to take flight. Nicola clears a foot of space on the desk to help me strap one of the live camera rigs to my helmet. After the thoughtful application of duct tape, rubber bands, paragliding line and crossed fingers, I’m ready to hop into a helicopter and show these nice folks a good time.
V
ery few people in the crowd have seen someone riding on top of a diving, carving wingsuit. Today, thanks to the contraption Nicola has duct-taped to my helmet, they get to watch it close-up and live. By the time the shuttle boat has plucked me from the landing raft and paraded me in front of the screaming lakeside crowd, Lake Geneva has shoved the clouds behind the jagged Swiss skyline. I pack and race to see how Max is doing in the scores. It turns out he’s doing very, very well. He just knocked (a very gracious) Horatio Llorens out of the competition—not bad for a first-time competitor. When I exclaim about it, Max grins and shrugs. “I’ve been flying for a long time around Torrey Pines, since the beginning. I was 10 years old when I started hanging out with my dad at the Gliderport, and I did my first tandems at 11.” He laughs. “My dad wanted to
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