CYPRES Athlete: Paulo Perini

My name is Paulo Perini and I am from Brazil. I started skydiving in 2002 and began working in the industry when I moved to France in 2008. In 2010 I also stared working as an instructor in Bottrop which was the ISG (Indoor Skydiving Germany) mothership and for many years has been one of the most progressive and important tunnels in the world. Along with this I was traveling and organising at events like the Nordic Meet and some of the early Fly4Life camps.

My career in the tunnel continued. In 2015 I began working for iFly in the USA, then from 2016 to 2018 did the same in Brazil. In 2018 I had the opportunity to move back to France to work at both Leon and Marseilles. During all this time I did not stop traveling to work and at organise at events. It was always skydiving and tunnel at the same time.

Back at the start of my professional career the information about skydiving in Brazil was not easy to get. I was still going home to organize record attempts, but news did not spread out the way it does now. Communicating online via social media did not yet fully exist as a way for skydivers to get together, and there was a lot of culture for people to travel abroad for more established events in the USA and Europe.

Every time I was coming back to Brazil for vacations and stuff I would be organising events – sequentials and stuff that we were doing a lot of at the time. Things were moving forward quickly in Europe, so I always had ideas for things to do at home. Also it was not only me, I had a lot of friends that would visit and who would travel to events, so we had nice crew. The Fly Factory team at that time were all making trips to events to learn and develop their skills.

For a long time we did not have a proper civilian tunnel in Brazil, so people would still travel for camps and to attend skydiving events. I joined Fly Factory way back in 2005, but Boituva then was not what it is today. Now there has been huge changes an the sport has grown a lot. Maybe 2018 or 2019 is when we started to notice a lot of growth in the numbers of people – more students, more skydivers – and as a result more schools opening up around the dropzone with more coaches and athletes with the skills to pass on.

Now Boituva is one of the biggest dropzones in the world, where we jump every possible day and have seven Caravans to use if we need to. Brazilian jumpers used to be forced to go abroad for nice events, but not anymore. Now we have regular things happening here at many different schools. The cost of getting involved and moving forwards in skydiving became more affordable in Brazil rather than going away somewhere, so our numbers grew. The economy is having a moment right now, so things have been holding steady, but it is still impressive to see the numbers we get and the level of engagement.

So now along with Fly Factory at the dropzone, I am the operations manager and trainer for the tunnel here in Sao Paulo. I am the only examiner for the IBA in South America, but I have a pretty good balance of being able to split my time between the tunnel and the sky, which is pretty nice.