posted Jul 29th, 2010 - Last weekend's leaderboard was replaced with a new one sooner than usual. The reason is obvious, as the currently listed teams are the ones that will compete at the World Championship of Formation Skydiving 2010 in Menzelinsk, Russia. It's an effort to introduce the field to the audience early enough.

The previous leaderboard has neither been removed nor have the teams been forgotten. In fact, new scores from the Virginia Parachute Council have just been added.

There is also one team that is on both leaderboards. Denmark's national team Bodyflight Voluntas attended the national championships at home and then traveled to Russia immediately. Voluntas has already been training for a few days in Menzelinsk after arrival.

Wednesday afternoon in Menzelinsk, Russia

The NSL-TV camera captured the first scenes live at the dropzone in Menzelinsk on Wednesday. It is very impressive what the Russian host has put together. Meet Director Vladimir Gazetov has built a little skydiving village, together with the dropzone owner and with the help of the city.

The final preparations are in full swing. The video shows that work is still in progress. However, the Menzelinsk skydiving village is ready to welcome teams, competitors and officials with a beautiful setting and great skydiving weather. It is hot, and the best place to be at is in freefall.

Three LET 410 will be used for the Formation Skydiving and Artistic events. The planes with a left-hand door, similar to the Twin Otter, are currently busy lifting several teams to jump altitude for training purposes.

Teams on and off site prepare in different ways for the showdown that begins with competition jumps on Sunday. The French delegation arrived in Menzelinsk this morning. The defending 8-way world champions of 2006 and 2008 know that they are up for a very tough fight this year.

The new linup has significantly less training compared to the previous national 8-way team. At the same time, there are two very strong opponents that will most likely turn this year's 8-way competition into the closest battle in history.

New French 8-way member Martial Ferré, 4-way world champion of 1999, prepared himself in his own way for the upcoming battle. It seems like he really anticipates a tough fight. Big job, as the US Army team surely knows how to fight.

It doesn't look like the sword that he plans to use in the fight is the 8-way Excalibur, even though it is in French possession at the moment. By the way, the first Fun Flag investigation brought to light that the flag is in Belgian hands. The NSL News will follow up later.

The French 8-way job to defend the sword is so challenging this year due to the fact that the new Golden Knights lineup is far better trained than any other 8-way team in Menzelinsk. The new team members are young and were eager to train a lot. Now they want to show the results of their short 8-way career after intense training in the last two years.

Then there is the Russian 8-way team Barkli with highly skilled and very experienced competitors.

The lineup was put together late, only earlier this year and much later compared to the Golden Knights and Aerodyne Cypres Maubeuge. The Russian team has not trained much, not even close compared to the French and the US team.

However, the skills and experience level is so high that the team probably doesn't need much training to get to the medal level.

The Russian team members were more relaxed with their preparations and battled it out between themselves so far, on the Backgammon board...