Skydiving World Championships 2024

At all levels, skydiving is something of a jumble. Both irreverent and deadly serious, our sport has always contained both willfully unstructured riffraff and sharply dedicated formalists. The juice is that these are quite often the same people. Every couple of years we settle up the bill on a bunch of stuff that is difficult to properly explain to the uninvolved, yet deeply important to those who shake the creases out of their matching tracksuits and turn up to throw down. This time we are in North Carolina, repositioned from Israel and picked up by the heavy lift crews of the Eastern USA – Skydive Chicago and Skydive Paraclete XP.

Crystal Coast Skydiving is in the Outer Banks region, where for the most part people get very excited about the kind of fishing you need a boat with many massive engines on the back to do properly. As visitors from far and wide, we all embraced the local culture by renting the biggest cars we possibly can, aiming to settle for good and all whether it is possible to fit an entire 8-Way skydiving team and all of their shit into a single vehicle. 

The ceremonial element of a world-level competition is traditionally a bit of a lottery, with good intentions but mixed results. The Americans have fortunately always been good at the old dog and pony show, with the alpha and omega of ceremonies taking place away from the airfield and in a tidy old civil war fort and a decently appointed civic centre respectively.

Michael J. Smith Airfield is the type of small regional airport you can find all over the USA, crisscrossed with the sort of pristine asphalt and grass that makes skydivers from a lot of other countries moist with jealousy. The local crew dressed the place up well, in the usual fashion of open white tents for each country, further adorned with flags of present nations – sometimes doubled up for the smaller delegations and sometimes spilling out over the edges for those with many members. 

Competitive skydiving disciplines are subject to the ebb and flow of interested numbers, with both fashion and politics playing their hand. The lodestone of formalised freefall teamwork has always been the belly disciplines, given weight by the industry’s structural investments – visually recognisable by the high percentage of military-looking folk. The artistic disciplines have suffered from dwindling numbers for some years, but not from waning quality. It is likely still the disconnect between the required effort to go big and the baffling judgement criteria of said abilities that see the number of participants go down and not up, but here at the tippy top, the skills are exquisite. 

Participation has seen growth in the categories where things are ideally more simple. Both wingsuit performance and speed skydiving have developed forward momentum from supportive communities that share and encourage. Anyone who has spent years as part of a skydiving team can tell you about the challenges of getting things done, to which the idea of solo training and motivation plus results decided by technology and not opinion, appear as a soothing balm. The technology is not perfect though, with glitches causing a lot of re-jumps to get the competition done and the decisions decided.

In a sport that evolves as quickly as skydiving, politics and heated discussions cannot be escaped. Following the previous world meet in 2022, the wingsuit performance types aimed at setting the definition of what a competition wingsuit is, and while progress was made, new conflicts appeared. From the perspective of the casual observer, finding common ground between the letter and the spirit of the law is both important and not easy to do. Turbulence aside, the numbers achieved by these competitors are what just a few years ago were thought to be impossible. 

The Americans cleaned up when it came time to give out the medals, with a USA team or individual lifting the trophy (or indeed waving a sword about) in all the categories that had something fancy to lift. US skydiving has strength in numbers, but they also have the ability to take something seriously enough to give their ambitions a boost.  

There was also a strong showing from Australia in Speed Skydiving and Wingsuit Performance, which is a good thing when they are routinely the most fun on the podium and at the party. Being far away from the traditional centres of the skydiving industry, the Aussies have a tight and supportive community in general, and it shows in their conduct at world level. 

All that remains is one more dinner, one more round of drinks, one more bunch of hugs to the friends and rivals you will see again in a year or two. One more paddle in the warm ocean, one more trip to the firing range to do things we cannot do at home, one more baffling walk down the breakfast cereal aisle of a supermarket somehow called Piggly Wiggly. 

Thanks, America. You smashed it once again. Also, you are, as ever, totally bananas.