The Unfiltered Truth About Paragliding Governance: with Bill Hughes & Goran Dimiskovski

Achieving strategical goals with build up of emotions. It's well known. And what happened in your podcast is exactly this, is using things out of reality, out of context to reach emotional shock. And for sure the statement flying over dead bodies. Come on. This is alarming enough how it is put forward because this is not describing the event at all. It's indecent. It's not about the content, it's about what is the target of that discussion. Civil Release, The whole history of our Fly Master relationship and since they were purchased in 2018, we've spent zero money on Fly Master. Want the question of proxies? The same people complaining are massively using proxies in the

World Cup structure. The same people are running across the board and collecting. Proxies. We had more proxy votes this year than actual members being present. And really the solution is to bring more money into this world. And like Goran was saying, if we want to really up level it, we're going to have to like hire employees and have equipment to do these broadcasts, etcetera, etcetera. And so we can do some things to make the sport more accessible to a wider audience and maybe attract some sponsors.

In one podcast, it was said that it's a shame flying over dead pilots and civil has no humanity. That was in reference to the to the PABC. And you and I have talked about the facts there. And the facts are that that's just not at all what was happening. So I was actually in that competition, one of the competitors, and it's fairly offensive. I know the comment didn't originally come from you, but unfortunately it said on your podcast. So I just wanted to see if you had anything to say about that comment. No, I mean, indeed, it was shocking just to hear that as an audience and a lot of people who follow this show also expressed

their opinion on various comment sections across various platforms. So, but I just want to get things straight. Is the event as it has been told or is there some variation to the version that has been told here a few weeks ago? Yeah. So what happened was a pilot had crashed, and it was obvious that it was a bad crash, but nobody knows exactly what the status of the pilot is until somebody gets to him. And it was much later in the day before a helicopter crew could even get to him. So the organizers, and this is a PABC event, the organizers had a decision to make.

They knew they had a helicopter coming in and if they had all the pilots immediately land, then they would be trying to land in the exact area where the helicopter was coming in. Or they could just let the race go on. The start was like minutes away and as soon as the start time hit, people would fly away from the area. So they made the decision to just fly away from the area and the race went on. Of course, later after everybody had landed, we found out that the pilot had died and then next day we took the day off, had a day off and in memory of the

pilot. So it's just a gross misrepresentation to say that that all of the pilots have no humanity. And I don't even know why he said civil has no humanity. But it's a misrepresentation. And it's a disgrace to say that the pilots who were flying that day were knowingly flying over a dead pilot and didn't care. That's just it's it's, it's deeply. Offensive. I know. I I understand the other sentiment well, and I think I'd like to thank you for clarifying. Because the notion that that had been set in people's minds so far was that probably the event had happened before the onset of the task and it was a collective decision to, you know, continue

with the task regardless of the gravity of the event. I would like, I would like to elaborate on this a little bit because I was in the middle of that operation, you know, building up of or achieving strategical goals with build up of emotions. It's well known tactics. And what happened in your podcast is exactly this, using the things out of reality, out of context to reach emotional shock. And for sure the statement flying over dead bodies. I mean, come on, this is alarming enough. How, how, how it is put forward because this is first of all, not describing the the the event at all. Nobody flew over him

permanently. It was passed by because it happened just close to the take off in Catholic, just maybe 2-3 hundred meters to the to the left of the take off on the first rocks and maybe a kilometer or more. It doesn't matter. It's the 11th. It was the entering of the speed section. So in the moment when we have reports from the air, that was a violent collapse and hitting the rock and the pilot, of course, went down. It's a very steep terrain and it's dense, very dense woods in the Foothill. So the organization, they reacted immediately. We received not one. We received 2 helicopters on site. The people tried to put this

rope down with maybe 200 meters long rope, which is extremely risky due to the pendulum. And everybody, everybody literally did their best people involved reporting from the air. I it's, it's, I'm not that kind of guys now to say names and to make some another trouble for for anyone but very reputable and serious people. So now after all these years, somebody to put this out of context is indecent. You know, it's indecent. It's not about the content, it's about the, the what is the target of the discussion? What is the, the real target and what is the what we would like to explain now is that everything is wrong in the

discussion. From my perspective, things like this are happening all the time, not. I understand. Yeah. Yeah, the context. Yeah, in these few months we have so many things out of context and so many, you know, really, really build up of emotions. I mean, we have, there are no multiple sets of reality. Reality is only one. And then what you do with the facts and how you present them are the sites and the options. You know, in this case, pilots in the air organization, World Cup organization, me personally, whoever was involved, you know, everybody was very, very aware what we are doing. It was coordinated. We let the pallets go away

because we needed the place clean. We didn't want to have anyone landing there, anyone hanging around. We want them to go away. And that was a tactical decision. So it's not just happened. We decided to do this collectively in order to clear the space as fast as possible downwind because then disappeared in question in in minutes. And we have helicopters with a clear path to come as. Fast as so just to get the context, you know, breakdown in chronological order for the audiences, the task started, then this incident happened and as soon as that happened then the waypoint was set. Like how did was there a change of course mid middle of the task

or if you can just tell the event sequence of events how that worked? Nothing of that. It was a properly set task with a start of speed section in close to the table to the take off. This incident happened on the way to the beginning of the task on the way from the take off flying to the beginning to the start of speed section on the way there. So there were many pilots in front already. There were some pilots still on the take off. You have an incident, you have an incident, you have reports, you don't know nothing you don't know is he injured? Is he alive? Is he is unfortunately dead.

So you work with what we what you have. This is a standard procedure and I can guarantee to everyone that these events were done by the rules, by the book, in the standard practice that we are doing. OK. Yeah. First of all, thank you for putting it on so clearly. I think the most important thing that you said out there was the the facts and the way they are being presented and your current narration of the things. First of all, it's transparent. I would say like you know, you've said it out loud in front of everyone. And secondly, a first hand experience wherein you were the part of the crew which was

seeing all the action. So yeah, if you look at the broader picture, I think that statement does not make sense because the wave was put was made to believe that this event happened earlier and the competition went on without any further consequences. But yeah, Bill, I think, I hope that clarifies the stunts and and yeah, yeah, the the, the option to clear in front of the audiences as well, and not just to me. Yeah, no, that's, that's perfect. Thank you. And so another one was, and I can't remember who said this, but civil, civil made centralization of power and are making secret deals behind closed doors.

So in social media, you know, there's been lots of accusations of, of secret deals and, and you know, so it sounds very exciting. I would love to know what are, are you aware of, of what these secret deals are? No. Did anybody elaborate? No, I'm, I'm aware of the base camp group. So thank you for giving me a chance to be a part of that, which seems very transparent with all the talks that is going on in there. I think more or less the secret deals, the most recent one has come up in in the form of pilot's union. So I think what basically that context must have been said in a manner that there was a

disconnect between the interaction between pilots and civil and you know how the flow of information goes between the bodies. So I think that was the point that was being elaborated in that context. I think, I think one of the one of the accusations that's been leveled at civil is related to, you know, fly master. We have, we have somebody in the Bureau who, who works for flight master. He was just, he was just re elected six months ago. So everyone knows who he is and his potential conflict of interest was, was disclosed. But you know, I don't know if you've seen it, but Civil released the, the whole history of our flymaster relationship.

And it's, you know, this, the trackers were bought in 2018 before he was even involved with Civil. He did, he became a a delegate in 2023 for the first time. And since they were purchased in 2018, we've, we've spent zero money on on fly master. We fly master has only gotten data charges from us. They haven't charged us anything. They haven't charged us for any other work that Cristiano and they have done for, you know, building out the whole infrastructure. We have this whole infrastructure for pilot tracking and retrieve management. And it's, it's fantastic. It's state-of-the-art. It's, it's what's inspired some other companies now to, to be

doing their own systems, which is great. You know, it's, it's the whole thing has spawned some competition, which is fantastic. But if you'd allow me to elaborate on that, I think the most recent development in that story was that Wolando was saying that the access to API keys or something, I'm not a developer by any means, wasn't available and that's why they weren't given a fair chance to bid or even even after having a superior life tracking. So I think the conflict of interest part which is being spoken in the whole civil design movement is pointing on that. Yeah, yeah. But, but there hasn't been another bid. So that's not, that's what I'm

saying. We haven't bought any new trackers. So what we did was this was like earlier in the year when we were thinking about buying a new set of trackers. I talked to FAI and I said, hey, look, you know, we we need to make sure that we do this in a transparent way. Can you provide you FAI headquarters? Can you provide somebody to oversee this process for us? We'll do an open bid will, you know, make everybody you know on the same level playing field. Obviously Cristiano will will be able to bid as a manufacturer, but he can't be involved in the process of evaluating. He fully is on board with that. And there hasn't been another

bid. We we haven't, we haven't decided whether we're going to even buy a new set of trackers yet. Right now the the plan is just to rent trackers temporarily until we figure out financially whether it makes sense long term to buy another set or be more flexible and just rent from year to year. Because like one year maybe we want to rent Bolando and the next year we want to rent digifly and the next year we might want to rent, you know, whoever. So, you know, there, there hasn't even been an opportunity for us to have had some kind of ethical problem because there hasn't been a purchase. So my meta comment is, is that

it's, it's disappointing that people are just assuming that, you know, anytime somebody says, oh, there's, you know, there's, there's secret deals being made or, you know, there's no transparency or whatever that people just assume the worst. And you know, look, we're just, we're just volunteers. We're, we're doing our best. There's no secret deals going on. You, I, I put you in all the base camp groups. You can see everything that's being discussed, everything that's going on, it's totally democratic. So, you know, like the next comment that I was going to bring up is somebody said, you know, civil has a dictatorship ideology. So I don't even know where that comes from.

Like in what way is civil a dictatorship? I mean, it's, it's frustratingly slow to get anything through the process because the only people who can make decisions ultimately are the delegates, right? So anything that we want to do, we have to get the delegates to, to devote for it. There's almost nothing that the civil Bureau can actually do on its own without, you know, without getting the, the delegates behind it. So I just, I just don't even know where that comment even even comes from. Goran, I'm going to come back to you for the comment that you wanted to make, but I think just to clarify the point here. What what it might have pointed

out was the voting strategy and the meaning of the policy of proxy voting and the the rules around it which don't allow you to carry the vote of more than a delegate, more than one delegate. And then the ones who are not physically present can only offset it to so many. And the plus the ones who are inside the Bureau also have voting rights. So which are mostly pre decided in an election because of, you know, their nature of work. So I think that is what it meant. But go. And I'm sorry we missed your point back then, but would you like to? Yeah. Yeah, I would like it's it's

it's well, I would like. Just just one clarification. Just one clarification on that though, it's it's not true that the debt that the Bureau has voting rights, only the delegates within the Bureau have dealt had voting rights. So, for example, I'm not a delegate. The president can't be a delegate. I was a delegate, but I gave that up to become president. And so I don't get a vote. And there's other, there's one other person in the Bureau who isn't a delegate, the the treasurer, and he doesn't get to vote. So the voting rights of the Bureau are only whatever rights the delegates bring as individuals. So that that's that's what that is.

On the on the voting issue, it's I think it's very important to understand that the structure of FAA is based on national clubs. So I mean, you know this relation when pilots now are jumping over the the structure. I mean, I understand it's easy to understand and perhaps for the better future maybe we should do it, but that we, it's not this Bureau is not, CL is not, it's the FA structure. Every single Commission is working in the same principle. So when somebody is saying Bureau members voting or not voting, they're forgetting you cannot be on the Bureau if you are not a delegate, which means

if I'm not delegate of North Macedonia, I could not be on the Bureau. So in that moment, my country, my national club delegate, the power of voting to me like to everybody else. So now there is only 111 way or delegates will not be Bureau members anymore. And then let's see who will be those people or the other ways to understand that when Bureau member is voting, it's voting for the nation. The nation, the national club gave this vote to him. You know, on the question of proxies, you know, so now this became a big deal. For example, the same people are massively, the same people

complaining are massively, massively using proxies in the World Cup structure because in the General Assembly, every single member has two proxies, not 1-2. In every single General Assembly, the same people are running across the board and collecting proxies. It happened this year. We had more proxy votes this year than actual members being present. OK, And it's a tool. It's a the lobbying and the proxies and everything. It's a tool. So now if we are really against the proxies as a concept, it has to go across the old organizations because we cannot have multiple systems. So now we are using one or another. Democracy works around the

common principles. Yeah, no. But in in that case, does online voting structures or the solutions that are being offered, because I think that is that was also discussed in one of the changes that was proposed in the pilots union. I can't recall in the back of my head from proxies. But all I'm saying is that does the voting structure need to be restructured or do you think that it's working fine and these like, let's say demands, well at least are not really legible? Yeah. I mean, what, what really needs to happen and unfortunately it's just a financial concern. What really the ideal thing would be just more delegates come to the plenary.

And I understand the reasons why some of them can't, but you know, that would be the best solution because every I talked to we. So I just got back a couple weeks ago from the FAI general Conference and all of the airport commissions are dealing with the same issues. And a couple of them have tried online voting and, and it just turned out to be a disaster because they, they lose all of the in person dialogue that were really some of the best discussions happen, you know, in the, in the working sessions before the plenary and in the halls and when they go to lunch. And you know, you, I mean, there's just no replacement for

the face to face, person to person conversations. You know, Hey, you said this, you know, did, did I understand you correctly? And, you know, so we don't want to lose that. And if we did, we, if we went to pure online voting, probably nobody would, would even come to the plenary. So it's a difficult, it's a difficult problem. I mean, ideally we would just find a way to have, you know, more delegates able to to come to the plenary. That's the best solution. Yes. And just to add, please, just a few sentences with the the the insisting on online voting is basically unneeded because the concept of voting is also

proposal. A delegate could proposal can propose something, it could be voted and it will be within the rules. And there is no more drama. So now we are operating by the rules and by the the structure that is in place. Yeah. So the pressure to change, why? Why we would like to change. You know why? Because this is opening another Pandora box, the people that are not well informed, the people that are not interested, maybe they will be contacted. Absolutely. This is going well. We are speaking, it's going all over in the background. And so now it's, you know, in a way solving one problem. We have a a new problem, big lobbying and pressure behind the

closed doors. The idea of bringing people to the plenary, the idea to bring people to live meetings. Every single company is trying to have live meetings. And then as a second best option is something else. Because in the case of a plenary, when we have everyone face to face, we can elaborate, we can explain, you can have a fluid discussion, you can make your point. You know, it's not someone who is watching Netflix in the same time from from a country that is has a 0 motivation 0 motivation in order to be a friend to someone in order to be manipulated. And then what, what what we have

maybe in this moment is looking like a useful tool for a certain group of people to achieve certain goals. But think big thing for 10 years, think for 20 years. If you open this, everybody can do the same. Everybody can manipulate. That's why the correct way, if possible, of course, and if legal, if it's voted, if it's in the rules, is to bring people in the favorable place when they can come. It's not too expensive and we can provide an an an arena to for democratic process and for direct communication only. Like this we will have a solid decision making. Yeah, that's Veltac. Yeah, Veltac Dora. One other, one other thing that

people sometimes forget is, you know, the, the ideal way that proposals happen is through a committee. So like for example, if the, if the paragliding cross country committee submits a proposal, they've, they've already all agreed on it. And so the likelihood that those proposals get voted down is very low. It's rare that those proposals get voted down the, the ones. So, so for example, if you're, if you're a remote person who can't come to the to to the plenary, but you have an idea, you can get your idea. If your idea is good, you can get your idea put forward through the committee and then, you know, have that have that approved.

And if there's a proposal that you don't like, you can make your case online for the many months before the the plenary and, and try to convince everybody that you know, the proposal's bad and they shouldn't shouldn't have it be a committee approved proposal. The difficulty comes when proposals are made last minute. And unfortunately there's too much of that happen. So like the days before the plenary, you get people together and they start talking and they're like, we just realized that we need to change this particular thing in the proposal. The people who are online would not have had any of those conversations or heard any of those conversations.

So it's impossible for them to even know what they would be voting on because they haven't had a chance, you know, to read the updates and stuff. So we're trying to, or we are pushing back the deadlines for proposal submissions. So this year, for example, all of the proposals have to be in by January 1st and and then once they're there, we're going to send out polls to all the pilots to get pilot feedback. So pilots will be able to say whether they like the proposal or not and they don't like them, why they don't like them. And then all of that feedback goes back to whatever committee

or NAC proposed it. And then they have about a month to revise the proposal based on the pilot feedback. And then the final proposal is due about a month before the plenary. So we've, we, we're already giving more opportunity for, you know, people who aren't normally part of the process or can't be part of the process to, to make sure their input is heard. So that's a, that's a good change we're making this year. Yeah. And I think like along with that you also put out press release which said that you're encouraging pilot involvement in in the civil Bureau. Is that also being taken in line

with the same steps and is like let's yeah, yeah, like is, is PwC also on the same lines? Are you guys going to follow the suit or do you feel the same need for, you know, similar directions? Well, let me talk about Civil first. I mean, this has always been the case about about Civil, but but we probably haven't done a good job at letting pilots know that they can join a working group. So the way the structure works for civil, like Goran said, this is true for all the airsports is you've got the delegates and the delegates are the representatives of their countries. And so some delegates do a

really good job of like staying in touch with their pilots and gathering feedback and letting them know what's going on. And others less so. They just, they don't have time, they're busy, you know, whatever. So, so realizing that we're now just reaching out directly to the, to pilots, but we've, we've always had pilots in the committees and in the working groups. In fact, the, the majority of the people in the committees and working groups are just pilots who aren't delegates. But anyway, we thought it was, was good just to remind everybody that we, we want you to participate in, if you, if you have the time and, and the expertise to, to join us.

I think we've gotten, I can't remember the exact numbers, but like almost 100 new people have joined various committees after that. So that's great. In the case of the World Cup, it's much simpler relation because first of all, the entire operation between the World Cup and Seattle is very different due to the intensity. World Cup has intensive program. We have 5 World Cup, Super final, 23 World Cups and majority of people are in constant contact. You know, so the the democracy in the kind of organization when every single pilot has a direct link, direct face to face opportunity multiple times per year to express I'm on every single event and majority of

people are are together. So there is exchange all the time. The problem in the World Cup is the formality of the proposals or the the follow up because you know, if you're following now what's happening, There are many great ideas, but not all of them are widely supported. You have again, the lobby groups that are supporting it and those people, those groups are getting overexcited or disappointed because their proposal is not going forward. Equalizers are the one of the best examples. So everybody will understand that how, how divided is the, is the field. So pilot feedback or the famous sentence pilots for pilots in the World Cup should not be

questioned, you know, because for example, in the General Assembly, you do not have delegates. You have individual pilots and they have a right to vote. There is secret vote. There is a, a show of hands. You have all the democratic principles how that could be done and collecting feedback. It's very easy, you know, and now after sending our latest communication, very safe, certain feedback. But in and I, I, I can make it as public and it will be public because we have Boris, our secretary is collecting all this data. You know, it could be published because and, and there is no such drama, you know, like, like we are experiencing in this

moment because creative people that really would like to push things forward. They have very precise, workable, feasible, financially supported proposals. And that is important. You know, everybody knows to propose something and I'm always asking, OK, but to propose something means a lot of things. Yeah, in the World Cup, it's a very direct connection. I think it's it's it could not be questioned. It could be manipulated for sure, but it could not be questioned in CFL due to the delegate system. And it's very important to add to what Bill said. If certain country has unfunctional system, for example, I don't know, in Macedonia, due to low financement from the government

for the national club, we have barely working in the national club. We have a structure, but it's barely working. So if we have some poor situation in Macedonia, so now due to poorly, poorly operational work of the national club, there is no delegate or he's not motivated or he's not going to the meetings. See how CFL or FAA can bridge this? Because the problem is it's imagined that certain people are motivated to be part of the system. When they're not motivated, the pilots of that country are victims. That's for a fact. We have the situation in Mexico, we have this, we have now the situation in Japan. We have the same situation in

Turkey. So it's not, it's not endemic. It's spread around the globe, you know, So now we cannot be blamed for unfunctional systems in members. That's why World Cup is different, because these members are pilots themselves. But it's properly. It's very important to understand how that works. Yeah. And you know, I'd like to bring our attention to this one statement that has been raised as a concern over the past few days since this incident of Bram, which actually started all of these discussions. And some people have been very vocal about expressing that racing somehow have tend to learn more towards speed than technicalities. And what I'm wondering is that

these, you know, the voting complications, the proxies, the structures, the way the administration works and the loopholes around it. Do you guys think somehow that has influenced the the leaning of the structure or is it even a real thing or just a myth or no? Well, let me let me take a cut at this 1st and Goran probably can even talk more elaborately than me on this, but I'll, I'll tell you what's been happening in the civil working groups. So there's an ongoing discussion about do we need to take speed out of out of the equation or some speed out of the equation? Do we need to like lower the

speed? Do we need to lower the speed on final glide? Do we need to lower the speed overall? Do we need to have a wing design that's a little bit different and safer on speed? And there's no, there's no clear answers. But what is true is that the majority of the voices from the delegates and in the committees are top pilots. So the entire sport, rightly or wrongly, is kind of oriented now towards, towards what the top pilots want. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, that's just the way it is, right? So that's why we, we launched the sport class poll and we're about to post that up on the

web. It's it's, I mean, we had over 2500 responses, really good, amazing response rate. And it's, yeah, yeah, it's amazing engagement. I've never seen a survey with that level of engagement. And it's clear that there's a lot of pilots out there that don't want to be flying CCC wings. You know, they want to be flying something that's a little bit safer, a little bit slower, a little bit easier to handle. These are pilots that aren't professional pilots. They're just people with day jobs and they they want to go out and have fun. They want to race, they want to be competitive, they want to challenge themselves.

But they're more cross country pilots than they are race pilots is one way to think about it. So I think that will take, if that moves forward, assuming it moves forward, I think a growing sport class community will take some of the pressure off because like, the problem right now is you have some pilots who love flying at full speed all day, you know, just put me in mashing the bar, just going as fast. Yeah. On a CCC glider, you know, mashing the bar, flying through turbulence, I mean, and, and they're good at it. They practice more than the average pilot can practice. And they're, they're masters at it.

And those are the guys that you see and some women, those people you see at the top of the WPRS and that's great. So that's like one kind of racing, but not everybody is going to be able to do that as safely as we would like them to. The point that was being trying to made was that is speed the correct way of gauging human performance in our sport, or should tactic be weighed up on as well? You know that that that is, yeah, Maybe Gordon want to do. Yes, yes. If you don't mind, do I can take a little bit. The original question was, and I

think we should go to the original 1 because you connected with the Brahms incident. And you know, first of all, I would like to publicly say this is an opportunity that what happened to Bram and all this is a chain of events that are for sure deserve deep, deep analysis. How and why and what happened. Some of those are protocol, some of those are like changing of the of the goal field, for example. This is these, these kind of things are not related to to the game itself. It's this is not related to the speed or to task committees. This is different. This is a technicality that, but

it's I really wanted to, to, to say this, that the, the, the call field was changed on the request of the team leader. You know, this is not something that we invented CRVL or local organizers. We have a meeting he started the previous day. There was slight pressure that with this setup of the ghost, we will not be able to fly next day. And this is the fatal in paragliding, modern paragliding which is let's try, let's try. And that's how we have many Level 3 days. That's how we have incidents because this let's try is improvising and that is leading to problems. So under pressure of let's fly next day, local organizers went

to find a new goal and chain of events started to develop. So, so you know, and it's, this is something that nobody's taking into account. So the idea, what is the idea that the CIVL jury or whoever or somebody just woke up in the morning and said, OK, let's change the goal. I mean, if you're a professional pilot or serious enough, you, you, you must ask yourself how did happened? So now the outcome is disaster, total disaster. I'm really deeply sorry for what happened because for sure there are ways to avoid it. But unfortunately the frequency of those events is showing. Also one other thing that

despite you're doing a lot of things, we have this frequency coming back and back and back and back again in the Clio Maurus, in the Clio Maurus interview that was pictured word to word, it's going in waves, ultra high development of the equipment and then pilots trying to catch up. You have incidents, then when the equipment is is stable, then ultra development of pilots pushing everything to the limits and then you again you have accidents and in meantime of these periods you have more quiet period. You know, and this is the real problem. The most important thing to be understood about speed racing everything is we didn't come here due to the set of rules.

We came here with evolution. Evolution, you know, it was year after year after year after year how it is working, it is working that World Cup is leading usually the rules or the concepts or leading points of concept of startup that doesn't matter. So and then it's tested it's tested five times per year, 6 times per year pre rolled cups, you know, tested, tested in the real in the in the real world and obviously nobody's complaining. So the system is developing into One Direction, more leading points, more leading points, more leading points as pilots are willing to say the game of controlling, the game of controlling. So it's developing, it's

developing, it's developing. The people complaining now or being so vocal, they are all part of this process. There is always this famous and listen to the designers. Every major company was or is World Cup partner, which means every major companies designer have a say every single day. And after 3035 years of the World Cup, we have what we have now. Nobody imposed to anyone, you know, I don't know. I mean, for sure you can challenge my my, my wife absolutely on the on the end. There is some moderation. But do we, you know, we did not give an avalanche of complete. Yeah, to answer your question

directly, I mean, there are definitely people who feel like we've we've lost the the XC part of XC racing. We have now a race for sure. It's almost a drag race. The way you win now is, is you, you fly in a gaggle, you stay, you have to stay on optimum course line because if you're not an optimum course line, you're not getting leading points. And for sure there's tactics, but the tactics are related to, you know, how do I, how do I maximize my leading points? Because when everybody, you know, when not everybody, but when the majority of the field all comes in together in a big clump, which is what happens

now, the winner is determined by who had the most leading points because everyone's time points will be within one second, two seconds, 5 seconds of each other. So it's an interesting sport right now. But like some people are saying, hey, what about, what about the cross country aspect? What about like trying a different route, you know, and, and we've, we have, we have lost a little bit of that. But I I love the way go round put it, you know, before this where he explained how the evolution has LED us in this direction rather than, you know, being pushed around by yeah, by anyone. But like what I want to point out here is maybe anyone of you

can elaborate on this is in in my episode with Bill Buckhood, the previous one, he mentioned when open class was going away, he had a one man protest where he declined to fly because he said that it would slow down or kill the evolution of the sport. And he said that at time it felt like a disservice to people. I think he mentioned the name of Josh Cohen. I don't know how accomplished of a pilot he was, but he said that there were people out there who were able to keep their wings open and explore the technology to its limits and still call it a day. So there were humans who had

caught up and who were refining, let's say the evolution part, but suddenly it was just taken away from them. So if today A2 liner C Class is kind of encouraged more, aren't we, aren't we doing a disservice to the upcoming Josh Cones of tomorrow where they will be accessing A harnessed technology and not the one which could have been exploited to its limit because one minority is louder and one majority is not? Not that loud in this case. Well, what we're trying to do with the C or what we are doing with the C Class is. So there's two things to know. So sport class competitions are

already happening. So it's we're, we're not introducing something new. There's there's a sport class racing series that is I think doubling in size next year because of demand. Various countries have sport class, the US has won, Brazil has a new series. So lots of sport class competitions are already happening. And wing wing manufacturers are already producing higher performing sport class wings. So the toothpaste is out of the tube on that one. So we're not creating something new. What we're doing with sport classes, we're trying to put limits on the what can be considered a sport class wing before it gets to out of control. Because definitely there's a concern that people could

manufacturers could make wings that could pass EMC certification that would be far too demanding for people to handle. And so we want to prevent that. So right now we've got it. The proposal has a limit on aspect ratio and it has a requirement to have speed limiters. And you know, and the, the ongoing discussion is, is, is there something else that we could do, you know, to make sure that the wings don't get too, too hot? And maybe there is. And that would be great. If there is, we'll, we'll add that to it, but not doing anything. I mean, that doesn't, if we were to just do nothing, then that's

not going to stop sport class competitions from growing and it's not going to stop wing manufacturers from continuing to make higher and higher performing wings. So the the do nothing option, we're trying to take the do nothing option off the table and say, look, let's make at least incremental progress and put a definition out there that will, you know, moderate the growth of the increase in. Demanding handling of yeah. Yeah, no, I understand your point in here, Bill. But help me understand this because this somehow seems to be a bit of a complex structure to me when I look at it as a whole ecosystem. Time and again, as the evolution has taken on in the previous,

let's say 3 or 4 decades, ever since the boomerang like 3-4 era, every single pilot or designer has been chasing speed. Then somehow this is relatable to what Kriegel said and how Goran explained it, that we end up chasing performance and then we hold back on it. But if we look at the pattern of these major developments that have happened, be it open class or the origins of open class, which I think nobody talks about, everybody just talks about the closing of open class. But like what led us to chasing open class in the 1st place the the triple C rules, which again, all the manufacturers were just

going ahead and chasing, you know, speed with certain limitations. But the priority has been speed overall until even in two liner seas where the rule amendment from three lining to two lining was done to chase more speed. So deep inside we are chasing more speed and yet we are trying to harness those rules. It just like doesn't it seems like we are following a very flawed structure here and the pattern is repeating itself again. I would. I would like to just to point to something that is, you know, I mean, the question of speed on the deep philosophical level of flying is unavoidable. You know, we were in in during the Europeans in that was 20

years ago. There was this fantastic, fantastic basically presentation for the pilot in the opening when the, when the IT was just the IT was the time when they made this balloon flight around the world. So the person delivering with technology is the profession. But ballooning pilot. He said something that the speed is not important just for flying fast, the speed is important to be able to flying into wind, you know, So now the question is how much speed and basically how much risk with wind speed. Take an example of Crucible crucial is placed 70 by 30. You know, that's it. People are I mean when you, if

you do not know, if you're not using everyday, if you're not a serious organiser, you will never realise it. But it's extremely small place and the ability to fly up wind, you know it it's, it's it's a gift, you know so this is also part of the equation same applies to cross country records in Brazil wherever downwind 1000 kilometers in a row litre that's fine but not every place on the planet have this many many, many benefits are coming with speed. So now the correct question is not how to limit the speed. The question is how to have safe behaviour of whatever is flying at certain speeds.

You know because the the the the question with C Class and development. The safe behaviour I would like to point out is that there were people of Josh Corn Level who had developed that safe intuitive human behaviour which allowed them to handle these machines and there are pilots today of Honouring and Maxine Level which have developed that. So as Bill mentioned earlier in the show where he said that there are pilots who go out, put in the work and want to fly full speed all day on Triple CS. So innately there are pilots who are able to handle speed, Then what? Why are we trying to limit speed once again?

Well, yeah, so I mean, I, I was flying those, the open class wings back then. And you know, I think Bill Court mentioned this as well back in those days, you know, I was flying a wing. Everybody's wing blow blew up regularly. I mean, you know, I would never have, I would never have a task where my wing didn't blow up two or three times. I mean every. I used to joke with people that every every task was ASIV course. I didn't need to take SIV course. That's what I was wondering like. Yeah. So yes, you know, some people can handle it. You know, Josh is an amazing pilot, one of the best pilots

that the US has ever had, and he's fantastic. And there are definitely pilots that can handle it, but there are a lot of pilots that that can't handle it. And just like any sport, you know, you can't. You need you need to make it more accessible, but so it can't be the F1 where you only bring the 20 best wing handlers in the world to race. That's not a viable format. Exactly. Yeah. So, so I think Gordon really hit on the the right point. So Luke Armat, I think you had him on at one point. But you know, Luke right now is is pushing for more stability.

He thinks that he can achieve more stability by increasing speed a little bit for technical reasons that, you know, I barely understand, so I'm not going to try to explain it. But you know, in, in general, people aren't pushing for more speed. They're pushing for more stability. And but, but Goran's right. I mean, you know, more speed is not necessarily a bad thing. It, it enables us to fly in places and in conditions that we wouldn't otherwise be able to fly. So I mean, really we should be focusing on stability. I was, I was telling somebody the other day, if a, if an alien came and reviewed our accident report and you know, had never

had never seen anything about the sport, they would, they would review all of our accident reports and they would say, well, the problem is clear. You guys need to fly a wing that doesn't all the time. Every accident, every accident report says that the winds are clear, you know, so, so stability is really the thing that we should be going after. Bring back the hang lighting days, the good old stuff. No guys, I mean, I want to quickly move on to the next point before we run our time. But these are like such insightful discussions where you know every single rebuttal where wherever you have to make them as something so making a lot of

sense and the knowledge that is coming with the after dark. But this like time has flown by. But Gordon, you have been, I think an integral part of the new Pirates union, you know, gaggled report and you have seen how the like what all is happening there. And drug noodles have been in question for quite a long time with big opinions coming in in favour and against and a lot of them making sense at the same time, which makes it even more confusing very quickly. Any thoughts on how the solution looks forward in time to come? Listen, this is the question that is, I think now, especially

in this pilot union, now everybody can see how difficult it is. You know, it's just coming in rows. We have four options. We have four options. And then in the every single post you have comments. They're going in totally opposite direction. They're going in, in total conflicts in intellectual conflict, approach conflict, practical conflict, technical conflict, all, all sorts of it. Because we would like to find the magic stick for something that is simply not equal, you know, So now for sure, moderation is, is, is is more than needed. And as Bill explained, equalizers, whatever a tool, but also those tools are not the gut. Those tools are limited. There is a range that we can

cover with these tools. World Cup put a lot of effort into this doesn't matter who thinks what we we went through a lot of long process of creating acceptance. First of all, acceptance at present the noodles first time in Gordon it was in 24 in September 24. We showed them to the pilots on on the briefing. And I said in that moment, I said this is the future of our, you know, but I was not really aware that we will have such a resistance or resistance is such a non acceptance, such a, you know, non, yes, non acceptance, you know, because of course they're very, very logical. I mean, and justify the reasons

why somebody should not like them or not be willing to fly with them. That's understandable. But as Bill said, something is needs to be done. So we try to World Cup propose with Seattle together. And this is going in the line of collaboration between World Cup in Seattle being basically a good thing. We propose to them World Cup, propose to Seattle to run every single practice day in the World Cup, to be run with the with the noodles tubes. We didn't know. So we wanted to do it in, in, in felter. It was logistically complicated. We messed up. It was, I can say it was a logistic problem that we it was

our mistake. But then in Turkey, everything was put in place. We made special registration for the day. We had 70 plus pilot that applied to fly with them willingly. We distribute them. We had the briefing, they put it on the gliders, we went on the take off. So it was everything ready to go on the training task. Fantastic. And then of course Accera is windy place and boom, we were not able to do it because we had 30 plus kilometers of wind and finished. So now my personal opinion is I don't think it's a magic stick. I don't think it will solve the extremes. Extremes and you can see this especially in the, in the union,

there are vocal people, girls, really small people that are saying it doesn't matter what I do, I cannot reach this competitiveness. So it's now not going to the, the noodles, it's going about the performance of the small wings. But I, I, I really believe, I mean, we need to do something about it. Is there is there a second best solution possible that has been considered? Or is this like you know nothing else comes in close so far? Well, the, the, the, the first thing that we proposed a couple of years ago was lightweight classes. So lightweight classes is something that the, the British do, the US does, I think

Australia does it. It's simply just another class, right? So or, or maybe two other classes. But the delegates don't like that. They, they voted, they voted that down. So that's, that's another solution. Bruce Goldsmith has a solution called MRT. The the general consensus is that that kind of like makes things a little bit too complicated for people to understand what's happening, like if you're watching the event. But so that's, that's another possible solution. And then the other, the other possible solution is just to reinstate the ballast rule. That doesn't solve the fairness problem. In fact, that makes the fairness problem worse, but it addresses the safety problems.

Civil's position is, look, we've been talking about this for more than more than two years now, more than three years. And in that time we've we've lost some lightweight pilots out of the sport. There's been some really top, mainly female pilots that have just said I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to have to fly with, yeah, it's a shame. I don't want to fly with 20 with 20kg of ballast in order to be competitive. And we've had pilots that have landed and there's no way to prove this, obviously, but it, it's, it seems clear that they, their injuries were, were made much worse because they had 15

kilograms of weight strapped around their, their bodies. And God forbid somebody with a weight vest landed in the water, they would just immediately sink. So, you know, it just doesn't seem like the right thing to do to just continue to do nothing. So none of the solutions are perfect, but it it just really seems like the time is is now to do something, to try something and maybe we iterate, maybe we try out different solutions, but the do nothing approach of ignoring the safety risk seems seems really irresponsible. Has civil office or you know maybe PWCI don't know how hectic it is. Like have you guys seen these

levels of activities before, let's say a collective new formation of a union which is bringing a lot of points upfront for discussion and the pilot involvement on the individual level like the engagement as you mentioned earlier as well in the polls have been of unprecedented levels. So do you see somehow that this barrage of information of some sorts has been generated because of the Instagram movement? I I would like to to comment on this bill, if you don't mind Seattle resent movement all this we will. I expect we will speak separately on this. It's just that this level of activity, you know, I don't I'm not sure that people are realizing how paralleling how

much which we are mature sport. We are not something to be rediscovered. Paralleling is fully functional mature sport exercise day by day. In the Seattle calendar, you have 350 plus events per year happening year by year by year by year. This is an army. This is an army of participants, organizers, people. So now, so when we speak activity and when we speak, we do not need to redesign everything because the quality is what matters. It's not the level of activity. Common sense is not needed. You know, everybody who runs a school or who runs a club, he knows a new people are coming always and bringing experience

from their own scope of activity. We should do this, we should do that, we should do this, you know, but after 30 years of experience, I, I, I am not missing an opportunity to save everyone. We know where the problems are. Ballast is the one is their solution very difficult, Very difficult is their solution for this racing concept very difficult to be solved to to turn back to the racing concept and to create something like MRT. People aren't cautious. So it's not about the level, it's about what will come out of it. And what is the quality of this discussion. Discussions on base camp never ever stopped. Never, ever these bureaus

together for long time and the it's, it's not that bombastic. But when you take a look on proposals, you will see the outcome of these discussions. There are many, many, many proposals coming year by year by year. So democratic approach, big activity for sure. It's very healthy for the community. It's very good to have pilot union and everybody's making a reference to the F1 drivers union. For sure they are F1 drivers, F1 drivers, 20 in the world, which means professionals, well educated, very well supported with, with information, knowledge, they know exactly what they're doing and they know exactly what is the problem. So basically what is important for us, the feedback is not

about the wow effect for the feedback is about the content. What is the feedback in the World Cup? Why we do not have such a we never experienced before? Maybe it will come. We never experienced such a pressure or such a discussions. The topics were very hot since ever ballast was very hot topic in the world in the World Cup in 2016, seventeen. We have this situation with the ballast because of the lightweight pilots pushing World Cup for unlimited ballast in order to be competitive. So we opened the door in 2017. I can name people that were leading this. Yeah. So that's the problem. It's not how many are

participating, it's what is the content in which direction we are going. Is it is? To me it seems like a lot of work like when it comes to the amount of working hours that need to be put to find viable solutions to this this Are you guys like basically understaffed to a point where the same person is having to do multiple roles which are voluntarily paid anyways? Reimbursed is maybe the right word and that is the reason why some VC2 positions against one name sometimes in the hierarchy. Yeah, I think people don't understand the the level of, of work that's that's required. And people, you know, at least

at least the the Civil War design movement was really just focused on paragliding cross country. There's also paragliding accuracy, and there's Hang Gliding, and there's, you know, aerobatics. Yeah, there's nobody talks about like ever. You know, which nobody's even talking about. Yeah. So yeah, it's much more complicated than people think. And you know, we, we are volunteers, we get reimbursed for travel expenses if we go to to an event, but or if we go to a meeting or something like that. But otherwise it's all, it's all volunteer. Yeah, there's we could use more people in the Bureau. Like I've been thinking about trying to add positions into the Bureau.

That's one of the reasons why I brought Violetta in. She's already that a great addition. So somebody to, you know, do more surveys and and help us with data collection on on accident reporting. One of the things that, you know, people have said in the civil resign movement is that there's no accident reporting, which is just completely untrue. There is accident reporting. You can go into civil comps and every every person who submits a competition for WPRS ranking has to submit accident reports or they or they can't submit it. It won't accept it into the system. So can we do better at accident reporting clearly, absolutely. But you know, Steph Malbos, he

was one of the past. He was the previous president of civil. He posted something a while back about, you know, the long history of accident reporting and the fact that, like, you're depending upon organizers and safety directors who really don't have time to do it right. And the pilots don't want to have to fill them out. And so, you know, it's it's not, you know, even that is not a simple problem. But to answer your question, yeah, we we could use we could use more help. That's why we put out calls to the community to say, hey, come help us make it better. Lead a committee, lead a working

group or just participate in community, participate in a working group. Do you one of the civil resign proposals just make me laugh? It's it's, it's to reduce the number of of vice presidents from 4:00 to 1. So, you know, there's general agreement that everybody wants civil to lead more of the discussions. You know that too many of the discussions go around and around and, and they need somebody to step in and it's somebody else needs to step in. It's not one of them. So they want somebody from civil to step in. So at the same time, they want more, you know, more leadership in the, in the working groups. They want to reduce the size of

civil, which is just a completely absurd idea. It's a solution that not only does it not solve a problem, it makes a problem worse. So. Goran, do you face something of similar scales in PwC or is it much easier because it's a smaller team and you guys can manage it better? Yes, of course it's the same in the World Cup because it will capture that well, you know, you cannot blame people for not being properly informed or to act around the the cliche of the of the corruption system in the world. You know, for example, when you ask about the the multiple functions in being focused in

one person. That's me. I I'm, you know. Yeah, you're a good. Example, but you know, you know you know why, But let's go through history in the World Cup that's practiced since day one. Savier Murillo was a technical delegate, was a mid director in million events. He was a general secretary of the association. You know why? Because it's, it's financially based, everybody's asking for more professional. What whatever, doesn't matter. What is it? How, what I do not understand how is the relation in between being total amateur, not be committed, not be active, not be available and being professional. You know, I will give you another example Now all these ideas about we will make a

course for the mediators. We'll make course for this for sure. It's, it's rotating in the CLS in, in our Bureau for 10 years now. Wow, you know, so literally, but I, I have a simple question. So now we're going to educate you to be a mid director. How are you going to practice? How, how are you going to practice how, how you become a good mid director? Because they will give you the material to learn or me or whoever will teach you. Yes, for sure. It's important education and then makes good you know and who will provide 20 events for you in over 2 years to be a mid

director and to to practice this. So you know, these these kind of relations are forcing people to take mood if you are motivated to work in paragliding, if you are dedicated, if you are available to have multiple roles, because like this you are practicing, you're able to in certain scenarios to learn. So basically you are becoming more professional than more exposure and with condensation of functions. In my case, in the World Cup, I am the president, which is in a way it's almost honorary, honorary function because the president has no direct obligations. And my second job is being event manager, which in the event manager is a real job.

It's job that is a proper activity. And then I'm also a photographer, so I I know exactly how to do it. Let's hire someone and in the limited budget of the World Cup, we do not have enough budget to spend on all the requests for social media for this. Then in so it so it pass up and it goes further and further and further. When Ulrich Jessop left the World Cup, it was one week before the event in in Targuson in France. And then we do not have a technical delegate in one week before. So then what you do, you become a technical. Delegate, of course you have. To so you know, because how, how

are we going to handle this? So the real question is, do I want to do it? Well, I'm not stupid, I'm not crazy. Who would like to have five jobs, 90% voluntarily work, you know, You know, in the World Cup structure, the, the paid function is only technical delegates. The rest is helping, creating, working, you know, So I'm in my case, I fully understand the frustration because the frustration is coming from the examples from the outside world. People like those are grabbing something, taking something, you know, taking what? What is there to be taken? You know, this is the angle that needs to be properly assessed. My words could be challenge for

sure, but just I'm saying this in order to make people think, to understand there is no endless number of jobs, there is no endless number of funds and there is no endless number of opportunities. I think what what you have described there is a beautiful way of like the power of expression because you know, how you, how you express also carries a lot of weight on what you express. I think that is what we started the show on as well. So social media has been an integral part of modern day communication in any aspect of our life. You know, not just paragliding just to interact with other

people or to discuss or brainstorm, but at the same time there is a small border which people can cross. Has this been issue hard to regulate in in your eyes that has eventually led to, you know, some hiccups that we have covered in the in the past few days? Well, I mean, there's a social media policy that FAI has and you know, there's a ton, there's a ton of people that are in clear violation of the social media policy. So, you know, that is what it is. What what I'll say is that there's two groups of people out there and what one group of people are are trying to come up

with good ideas and you know, ideally they're safety related because that's really what we need to be focused. On like the ones in. Base a lot of those people the. Ones who are. Already there. Like what? Yeah, like the ones in base camp who are working in the committees and working groups, but also some of the people on the union. I talk to people on the union and some of the people on the union, for whatever reason, prefer that format. And we'll take good ideas from anybody, right? So if somebody's working in good faith and they're trying to come up with good solutions to improve safety, we'll take,

we'll take those, do it in base camp, bring it to us, you know, some other way. There is a procedure. There is a set of way things can. Be. Yeah, yeah. And then there's another group of people out there that are just that are just angry and are just, you know, trying to distract people. They're putting out false information for whatever reason. They're trying to stir people up. I can clarify on this bill if you allow me to, because I'd like to add on a little bit more context to this question. You're saying that there is a standard operating procedure that is available for when somebody wants to make things happen and communication is not

hindered at all. But I think we did this in a previous talk that we had earlier before the show. Even though you come across as somebody who's very transparent, open to any questions, you know, willing to share information on hindered, it took me quite a while to get to you. And let's say the, the amount of people or the tries would generally discourage some people at that level. And I can relate to this example in in another context where it's not just FAI. Let's say I'm like designing a show with a couple of instructors where we are going to focus on how to improve safety or like the mindset at

grassroots level. And we said that let's try and pick up some data to look at some patterns. So we tried finding accident and incident records in European countries from 2024. It has been super hard to get people on e-mail, get the right people on e-mail and reach out to them. And in fact, my most recent denial was from Norway, where they said that we cannot share it even if it's for educational purpose because of GDPR. So I I do understand that there are SOP regulations in place that allow procedures to happen, but the amount of effort it takes for a layman to go through those processes is kind of

tedious and I think that cannot be denied no matter what. Well, I would say I would disagree. I mean, so in terms of you, you being able to get to me, you, you kind of got a little bit of a runaround from from headquarters. So, you know, I apologize for that, but it, but if, if anybody wants to be in a committee, all they have to do and we put this out of the and the notice, but they just have to e-mail civil_comps@fai.org and. And that that goes to Elena Elena. Says hey, this, person wants to go into the committee so. That's literally all that is required is they just e-mail

them yeah. I'm Happy to. I'm Happy to hear from anybody. What, what, what, what I meant to say is Bill, that let's say not just like 1 bureaucratic, bureaucratic example of of reaching out to you. But let's say on the other hand, when I'm researching for the episode and I'm trying to go through general knacks of every country to gather this thing and yeah, yeah. If I still face the hiccups because of the bureaucracy that is involved and I go out and rant it out on social media, does that put me at risk of receiving a warning of some sorts or, you know, some kind of a violation or Because that's,

that's what a lot of people have been concerned in, in Brazil where no, it was condemned. Yeah, No, no, no, no, not at all. So like the the situation in Brazil, you know, it was completely different. Marcella was a friend of mine, hopefully still is a friend of mine. She reached out to me and said, hey, Bill, you know, can you do something about this? Can you guys look at this situation again? I really want to have the competition and Andradas, it's her local site. She's very proud of it. She's really proud of having the world championship come there. Totally understandable. And I said, yeah, absolutely.

We'll take a look at it again. So we took a look at it again and you know, with CBVL and the NAC and you know, we're just cab and we, we couldn't find a way. You know, we said, OK, CBVL, can you guys organize the competition yourself? Do you have the capabilities to do that and the finances it takes? It takes a lot of finances to organize these competitions. You can't just organize it. You have to have sponsors. You have to have things worked out ahead of time. And they said no, we'd love to do it, but we can't. Everybody so civil, CBVL, everybody wanted the competition to stay in Andrada's.

That was the path of least resistance. And that's clearly what we wanted to have happen. But we collectively, we couldn't figure out a way to make it happen. So then Frank said he could organize the competition. We discussed that possibility. We made the decision to move it over. We ran that decision by all of the delegates. All the delegates said, yeah, we wouldn't have done anything different. We understand why it's happened to be moved. So it was a Democratic. So then after. There was a Democratic. Process. It was totally democratic. Yeah, totally democratic. And after that, Marcella was still complaining and still putting out some claims about

some corruption and this and that and still trying to lobby pilots to to be against this. And so we simply said, look, Marcella, we heard you totally get your concerns, understand why you wanted it to stay in Andrade, but it's not going to. It can't. And so it's time to disagree and commit. You know, there's a concept inside most companies, everybody's free to disagree, but eventually a decision has to get made. And if you're part of the organization, in this case part of of civil, you got to commit. And she didn't want to commit. So we basically just said if you want to fly in the world

championship, yeah, it's going to be in Costello. So that's you have to accept that. I think the whole warning question, or like the the topic from previous show, I think that was also on your list which was stated, was that it had its origins back in the day when some sort of mockery was made out of a day where a task was being called off and some meme was posted. And I think the suspicion was that everybody who liked that meme was sent a letter of reprimand or something that, you know, you're not allowed to participate or like whatever, Like, you know, this breaches the code of conduct or whatever.

Yeah, no, no, no, that that was at that was at the world Championship in in Argentina and you know, once again. I'll, I'll, I'll let you complete. Let me just finish it up. And I think how I'm relating it to that one is that the current, you know, criticism of the official structures has been loud and vocal and a bit professionally driven with the way the posts are graphically designed or, you know, they are the outreach or the engagement that it gets. So is this grounds for evaluation on same code of conduct violation that was done back in the day when this whole law had to be brought in place?

The the the code of conduct simply says that you have to be respectful and you can't threaten, you have to be respectful. You can't bring the, the institution into disrepute if you're making statements, you know, where it could be bringing the FAI in to distribute. So someone, someone just saying, you know, respectfully. So let's let's go back to the situation in Argentina. So the situation in Argentina, there was a level, Level 3 call and made by one of the team leaders and some people were mocking them and mocking the organization over that. They weren't just respectfully saying, hey, I don't really think that was the right decision.

I would like for us to re evaluate that and maybe understand if that really was the right decision. That's totally fine. Anybody is willing to is able to do that. The organization is willing to hear that. But mocking the organizers or other team leaders is, is getting to be like really common. And you have to understand that we struggle to find organizers for these competitions. We rarely have what's 89% of the Cat 1 competitions in parallel and cross country only have one bid. And so if you're an imagine you're an organizer and you're doing your best and you know, it looks like the weather's going to be terrible all day. And so the criticism you know

you can't behind it is disrespect. But I understand what you mean. Yeah, yeah. You cancel a task and then you get people like putting, you know, mocking and clever. Oh, you know, you guys are all idiots. You know what? You don't even know what you're doing. You know, blah blah blah blah blah. That might get you a warning because you're being disrespectful. You're not just making a, a well reasoned request that, you know, maybe we change the criteria for, you know, cancelling a day or whatever. You're being an asshole and we need more assholes and more responsible people. I I think to, to add on to that,

some people said that the Gray area, if any, in the definition of that rule, I'm forgetting the page number and the section, I think it's section 9 or I'm not sure, is that it could be used to suppress free speech, which was the suspicion in the Marcella's case where it said that it was discouraged from posting freedom of expression online out of. Mind Marcella spoke more than almost anybody I think, I think people would have a hard time saying Marcella was not free to speak. So there were plenty of speech going on, but it's but, but at some point the decision was made and you know, it wasn't going to get changed and continuing to

lobby against the CBDL and you know, make accusations against CBDL wasn't going to change, change things so. Just to, to, to go to the root, root of the question, you know, this, this topic of changing of the venue, even when we were preparing for this meeting, that was one of your questions. So, you know, I think it's important something to be to be delivered as in as a, as a global information. You know, majority of pilots or some of them we are running companies or we are working for someone. You're in some in some work relation. What CL is doing with the organizers, it's not not much

different a part of all these processes that we are speaking. This is ending up with certain amount of entry fees transferred to someone which is creating a business relation. And in business relation in general, the rules are very simple. Number one rule is trust. So how you protect yourself as an organization and then your clients in this in this situation, pilots from organizers that from certain reasons are seen as unloyal partners. You know, nobody, people are dreaming. You know, people are dreaming because they're positioning themselves as end users that will show up somewhere. And how that reflects to me for the management, for us and in this, it's the same in the World

Cup, it's a little bit more complicated because if you do not have trust, then you have 10 times bigger problem. What is the guarantee that we will have mid director? What is the guarantee that you show up and there is no one what, what you want to do? What do you think what you want? You want to make a, you're going to make a, it's a whole case. And that will yes. So now, now I can say it, That was the situation in Brazil. We woke up 1 morning without mid director, without stuff with, without. And it's documented, all of this is documented. It was circulated around the mid director was clearly saying I'm

not coming there. We were asked to provide mid director. So Can you imagine? So I'm the organiser and I'm asking CIBO, can you find somewhere for me and with list of requests what kind of mid director we need? You know, so these kind of relations are creating untrust that spread to the CIBO, to the local federation, to some other people being involved and suddenly they're ending up with situation when you do not have a solid basis. I don't want to make to mention the financial implications that are not cleared up even today. So there's still a lot of financial questions pending related to the original destination of the not not for

us, but for FAA, for the local national club. You know, so when you put all of this, the reason why we moved is 1 simple sentence. We faced unserious organizer. It's not us. When the it's important to understand, Bill can elaborate more in detail if needed. There is organized agreement. That organized agreement is made with the national club of the country. So when the national club of the country, in this case CBL is not willing to support their own organizer because it's a national event, the nation is the country's behind the bit. So what you're going to do, if you are running internationalization, you will tell who cares?

And that guy, CBL, basically those guys are the partner of FA and CRVL. So your local partners tell you I'm not supporting this and what you do. And then you listen to the pilots that have this. I understand it fully. I fully understand that for sure I would like to fly every single majority in Crucial when I'm at home, of course. But it's, Can you imagine, you come to Crucial and suddenly I'm on holidays. Theoretically, you know, so nobody's taking these details into the account, but the real reasons they're no, you know, these stories, this, this is that you we need to clarify. Do you guys think that, you know, this whole flow of

information that has come in after the incident could have been handled in a better way or the way like, all I'm wondering is the civil design and the criticism of the organization, could that have been done in a better manner in your life? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the person who started civil resign is a delegate that he could have made proposals within the structure. He and I talked about it quite a bit. He doesn't feel like that would have accomplished anything. He's kind of lost trust and civil. He made a post saying essentially he doesn't consider himself civil anymore and so he's trying to do it a different way.

So like in the early discussions with Julie and I told him it like some of the ideas I thought he had were good and we've already move forward on some of those ideas. So I don't disagree with all of the ideas that have been, you know, bandied about. I disagree with the way the process happened. You know, I disagree with using misrepresentations and salacious things like backroom deals and claims of, of unethical behavior and saying that it was civil's fault that there was a fatality at a competition. I, I object to using those as a way to get people stirred up about the ideas in terms of like the actual content.

Absolutely no problem with any of the things that that they're talking about being discussed democratically within, within the commissions, within the committees, within the working groups. Absolutely, yeah. Guys, before I close on for the day, because I we are way over time, but like, you know, so far the discussions have been beyond enrich full, you know, with information with some very valid points being made. So I didn't want to disrupt the thought process, but we often speak about, you know, the future, How does the future look in our sport? And you know, we're always excited about what's incoming. And I don't want to spend too much time at this point before

closing. But like 2018 Asian Games was kind of a landmark moment where our sport was given a chance at a event of that scale and was kind of possibility to have a brighter future. Do you guys, I don't know if you guys were at helm at that time or you know, how the structure is loved, but could could it have been done in a better way? And is there a similar chance upcoming if we do things right in a certain way? I'll tell you what I I wasn't around then, so I don't know about the that particular Asian Games, but I know that FAI is, is always looking for

opportunities to have multi sport events and to have world games events and things like that. I know there's discussions about 1 coming up in the next couple of years. So that's something that FAI really pushes. Goran, maybe you, I don't know if you were around then and. Know anything about that particular event? For, for that particular event, I mean, I know a few things, but I, I was not following this because it was out of my scope of interest or somebody, some Steph, Stephen Marbles, the, the, the leadership, real leadership followed that. But if the question is about the future and can we do better, of course that we can do better.

It's not nuclear science. How the other federation associations are doing better. How you know, in entire scope of paragliding administration, we have two half employees, you know, one in the World Cup and another one in, in, in CL, you know, So these people that should be the big bone of everything, the structure, communication, you know. So how you expect that we will be a seriously respected, accepted when we do not have professionals inside, not professionals by field, professionals by, by the amount of work put into achieving goals. That's the question. And if whatever we are blaming, it's very simple to ask ourselves who should do this, in

which frame, with which amount of working hours, with which amount of commitment and for how for and how that will work. If we do not have question, we'll be like this. This is like a like a little in, in, in, in kind of definition. It's like, it's like community moving towards something with kind of mutual understanding and, and, and balancing and something like this. You know, leadership cannot work like this. You know, leadership leads and then the of course in the democratic way, they are chosen or dismissed. And they said that, but leadership leads towards certain goal permanently, permanently, which means this set up the next set up, the third set up, the

5th set up of people being hired, engaged into the serious approach of the to, to, to to achieve goals. This is not happening. This is not happening. You know, it's simply not happening. After 35 years, we are discussing some kind of structure and nobody's saying let's become truly professional with the structure that gives people pushing, pulling whatever around, a structured job description, payment, Social Security and everything. If we are not able to achieve such a leadership, we should not speak about the future. Future will be just variation that we have now. Better maybe, of course, different people maybe, but the content will not move much forward.

So I don't disagree with anything Goran said, but one thing that came out of the the last FAI General Conference, so there's there's quite a bit of interest in, on online covering of various sports. Gliding is a little bit ahead. So technology's getting to the point where, you know, in gliders anyway, they've got cameras, you know, within the cockpit and they've got people following the race. And so you know, it makes it more accessible to a wider audience. And so it's getting to the point where we might be able to start doing some of those things in paragliding. And really the the solution is to bring more money into the sport.

Like right now there's just not a lot of money in the sport. And like Goran was saying, if we're if we want to really up level it, we're going to have to like hire employees and have equipment to do these broadcasts etcetera, etcetera. So there is some things that we're going to try to do cross airport to to try to make some of these technologies available and so maybe we can do some things to make the sport more accessible to a wider audience and maybe attract some sponsors. So there's there's hope for that. Do you guys see Red Bull doing it up to a certain level of

success with their new format and like showing like how it can be done on a commercial scale? Red Bull was a sponsor for a while and then they backed out. So I don't know how much, I mean Red Bull's very, you know, they're going to do it if it's if it has mass appeal. So basically we would need to get to the mass appeal point, I think before Red Bull would would be interested in engaging again. I was saying to reach my bigger appeal because Haigenfly is another one of the disciplines that is coming up. But of course, I think, yeah, solutions will be found as time

progresses. But I feel like we have kind of answered everything that we planned out to unless they'll. Do you have something more pending on your list that needs to be touched upon? No, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your time and I appreciate you, you know, helping helping get some more clearer picture out there. I know, I know it's a lot of work and I I appreciate the effort you put into it. I do want to say that I'm, I'm fairly positive, aside from all the annoyance of dealing with all the social media dumpster fire, I'm actually pretty excited about a lot of the things we've got going on.

I'm excited about sport class. We've got a working group of doctors and medical and rescue people who are super excited about putting together an updated standards for what kind of medical equipment do we need to have on site and what should the procedures be for deploying those resources and all that. So that's pretty exciting. So we've already decided to eliminate adding new goal fields. Seems like a small thing, but like Goran was saying, that was one of the contributing factors that day might not have made a difference, but maybe it would have. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of really good stuff and there's a renewed interest in the committees and working

groups. So, you know, again, I would just encourage anybody who wants to participate to reach out civil comps at fai.org, civil under score comps or to me or to Goran or you know, anybody that they know on the Bureau or their delegate. And we would, we would love to, we would love to have their contributions. I think most importantly, what I really would like to point out, not just to to both of you, but to the audiences as well as that as long as we have people at the top who are willing to take questions as transparently as you guys do, I don't think there should be anything to worry about because I think it was, it

was important generally in the parallel learning community that information like this should be unfiltered, come out as unfiltered as possible. I think we have managed to do that task today. So thank you guys. It's been, it's been an honor. Try to do it.