posted Oct 6th, 2018 - Competition briefing and draw took place shortly after the delegations and officials were back from their excursion to downtown Gold Coast for the opening ceremony.

Meet Director Bryan Burke provided the basic information for the highly experienced group of competitors in the stadium and did not have to go too much into all the details. Soon it was time for the assignment of the starting order and then the manual competition draw.

The same numbers and letters were pulled from the hat for all four Formation Skydiving events (4-way Open, 4-way Women, 4-way VFS and 8-way), even though they have their different event-specific random formations and blocks. Only the eleven sequences for 4-way Open and 4-way Women are completely identical.

It is not happening very often that a Super Sequence is drawn for any competition draw - whether it is automatically generated or manually. The last time it happened at a world meet was in Menzelinsk 2010, where the currently standing world record (56) for a single round (J,M,Q,P,L) was posted by the French and the Russian national teams both.

Eight years later, it is time for the next Super Sequence and possibly for a new world record. Round 6 at Gold Coast has a new sequence of five random formations (Q,M,F,C,N).

Four of the 4-way world record owners are currently at Gold Coast, while only one of them will also perform the new sequence in Round 6. Oleg Shalamykhin competed with the Russian Sky Panthers Barkli in Menzelinsk 2010. He is now player-coaching the Tanay Wolves who compete for Russia at the world meet in Australia.

His former Sky Panthers Barkli team mate Vladimir Pavlenko is also present at Gold Coast and will still own the 56-pointer world record for at least a few more days. He is competing only in 8-way with Russia's national team from Tanay. However, he gets his own world record opportunity in Round 10 of the 8-way competition.

The two other world record owners are not competing at the running event. Mathieu Bernier, 4-way and 8-way gold medal winner of 2010, is now the French national coach after his predecessor and 2010 team mate Jeremie Rollett, who is now coaching the Qatar Tigers. Mathieu Bernier will try to forward his world record secrets and experiences to the current French national 4-way teams...