posted Jun 13th, 2009 - The scores of the first five rounds are official and on the leaderboard of the Paraclete XP Indoor Skydiving Championship 2009, and history seems to repeat itself once again.

Perris Fury has been doing extremely well whenever it was time for the fastest sequences possible. The 59-pointer at the World Challenge 2009 was the latest example where Fury outscored the whole field, including Airspeed. The 52-pointer in Round 1 of this weekend's competition was the next example and put a distance of five points between Fury and Airspeed.

Brian Krause confiremd that the Perris team looks very sharp in Raeford and deserves the credit for the great scores. However, the distance to Airspeed after the first round and the whole indoor competition at Paraclete XP has to be looked at from a different perspective at the same time.

Airspeed is competing with a different lineup this weekend. Craig Girard and Eliana Rodriguez had to step back shortly after their arrival in Raeford, and Thomas Hughes and John Eagle have filled the Airspeed slots from the very beginning of the meet.

The 4-point difference after five rounds only shows how well trained Thomas Hughes and John Eagle are. Thomas Hughes is the Center Outside for Spaceland Force XP and replaces Craig Girard in this slot. His own team wants to beat Airspeed and Perris Fury this year at the USPA Nationals.

John Eagle has been the Point for Airspeed Vertical for many years. In fact, he was Craig Girard's piece partner until 2003 and won the gold medals for Airspeed Vertical at the World Meet 2001 in Spain.

Mark Kirkby was the Vertical Tail by then and still has the same slot a few gold medals later... Eliana Rodriguez would become the next Airspeed Point and piece partner for Craig Girard.

John Eagle was still active in 2008 when he was training and competing with Spaceland Directe XP. John Eagle, in the Directe lineup with Samer Haija, Kirk Campbell and Gary Beyer, placed 5th in the USPA rankings with an 18.0 average. His Directe team mate of 2008, Gary Beyer, is now training and competing for Spaceland Force XP with Thomas Hughes.

John Eagle and Thomas Hughes are obviously flying the front piece very well for Airspeed, as they are only four points behind Perris Fury at the moment.

Six rounds will be completed today, the remaining four rounds tomorrow.

By the way: SDC Rhythm XP's 22-pointer in Round 5 was only a random transition behind the highscore for the round and deserves a lot of respect.

And: Kirk Verner's son Alex is flying for the Paraclete XP lineup in the yellow jumpsuit.