posted Sep 20th, 2009 - One of this year's top contenders for gold medals at the USPA Nationals 2009 made a great effort to get ready for the championship and is out of luck at Spaceland in Texas, host of the competition in October.

Perris Fury has had serious video trouble at this weekend's September meet of the Texas Skydiving League, and in addition Fury did not get the competition they were looking for.

The Perris team started the 2009 season on a busy meet schedule, with the Valentine's Meet in February, the FSL Shamrock Showdown in March and the World Challenge in April. Fury met Arizona Airspeed at each of these three meets, and then again at another wind tunnel competition, the Paraclete XP Indoor Skydiving Championship 2009 in June.

However, the June meet was already less competitive for Fury, as Airspeed had to replace Craig Girard and Eliana Rodriguez. Eventually, the top contender from California ended up with very little serious outdoor competition practice since the beginning of the 2009 season.

That was one of the main reasons why Perris Fury packed up things and made the trip to Texas for this weekend's competition. Fury was planning to get familiar with the competition site and meet Spaceland Force XP, the third top contender for gold medals this year.

The Force was indeed at the drop zone, as well as Spaceland Blue, the US top contender in the female 4-way category this year. However, both teams decided to train rather than attending the meet and left Perris Fury alone in the AAA Class competition. It was surely not what Fury had hoped for and expected.

It got even worse for the Perris team after Fury still entered the competition at Spaceland. Serious video trouble hit the team really hard in six of yesterday's seven rounds. It started with a zero for Round 1 when the camera had zoomed in on the team in action.

Fury had only one single jump without any point deductions, the 19-pointer in Round 6. The 31 points in Round 2 turned into a 28-pointer on the scoreboard, four points were deducted in Round 3, three more in Round 4. Round 5 was actually a 21-pointer in working time, and two more points got lost in Round 7.

Perris Fury lost a total of 13 points in these six rounds, and nobody knows what Round 1 would have brought to the scoreboard. Fury would stand at a 24.3 average for the six rounds and without the deductions, but it's a 19.0 average on the official leaderboard at the moment.

The NSL News will follow up with more information of Fury's visit in Texas.