posted Sep 4th, 2014 - The German Nationals 2014 are still bothered by bad weather. The 4-way teams were at least fortunate enough to get in the air once on Wednesday afternoon. Round 1 was completed for all teams before the clouds came back to cover up the German skies.

The Sun Path Products NSL News mentioned with the first update from Germany that Arizona Airspeed's team videographer Justin Price is filming the leader in the open class competition, Airbus, and that he kindly provided the footage of Airspeed's competition jumps at the FAI World Championship of Formation Skydiving 2014.

The audience now has the opportunity to watch the race for gold medals in Prostejov between NMP-PCH Hayabusa, the new 4-way world champion, and Arizona Airspeed, the previous world champion of 2012.

World Meet 2014		Rd. 1	Rd. 2	Rd. 3	Rd. 4	Rd. 5	Rd. 6	Rd. 7	Rd. 8	Rd. 9	Rd. 10	Total	Avg
Rank	AAA Class	E,3,C,5	F,6,D,21	19,H,2	M,4,1	O,14,A,P	8,J,16	7,11,12	22,20,15	17,G,18	13,B,9	Total	Avg
1	NMP-PCH Hayabusa (BE)	32	29	25	25	33	25	22(-1)	18(-1)	26	29	264	26.4
2	Arizona Airspeed (US)	31	27(-2)	25	24	31(-1)	23(-1)	22(-1)	17	24	29	253	25.3

The scores of the two top teams show how clearly the Belgian team dominated the competition, in many ways. Hayabusa did not only complete the highest number of scoring points in the ten rounds. The Belgians were also the team with the lowest number of point deductions. Only two of the 266 completed formations did not count for the leaderboard.

Dubai Asaar Black was the only Top 6 team that matched the clean Belgian performance. Airspeed lost five points due to penalties and was never able to complete more points in time than Hayabusa in any round. Airspeed tied Hayabusa in three of the ten rounds and would have done the same in Round 2 without the point deductions.

The Airspeed members in Prostejov had no problem acknowledging the Belgian dominance: "We lost to the better team", was the simple summary of the meet.

The World Meet 2014 was also the last one for Mark Kirkby. He will compete one more time at the USPA Nationals 2014 this month and then retire from Airspeed's active competition lineup.

Mark Kirkby is one of the most successfull 4-way and 8way competitors in the history of the sport and won his first 4-way gold medal in 1995. He finishes 20 years later with a silver medal, after collecting a total of seven gold medals in 4-way and 8-way between 1995 and 2012.

Niklas Hemlin, Airspeed 4-way world champion of 2012, is now coming back into the active lineup. He will begin with training and competition after the USPA Nationals, and the new 2-year cycle will get on its way. The next Airspeed goal is the same as in the past: Gold medals at the next world meet, the Mondial 2016 on US home turf.