posted Feb 10th, 2011 - The NSL News story on 5 February 2011 covered the 8-way competition at the Paraclete XP Indoor Skydiving Championships 2011. The story included a video clip that showed some of the teams flying, with the up close and personal eye level view.

Performances of Paraclete XP8 and the Golden Knights were a part of this live coverage, followed by one of the French 8-way teams (French Connection) who were player coached by 2010 8-way world champions Martial Ferre and Damien Sorlin.

The NSL TV camera captured more "ground footage" while the 8-way competition was in full swing. The 8-way crowd had great fun watching their fellow competitors, especially when the limited space forced the flyers to apply some vertical maneuvers and use the available space as efficiently as possible.

It was not the complete dive pool that was applied in 8-way, and some blocks were slightly modified to make it possible to fly them in the windtunnel. However, the Golden Knights 8-way team, silver medalist at the World Championship of Formation Skydiving 2010, showed in an impressive way how even an 8-way team can train and compete in Paraclete's 16-foot chamber.

The NSL News has now added a Golden Knights 8-way summary of the videos from the judging perspective to the visual coverage of the indoor competition. The video shows parts of all ten rounds.

The US Army team did not have the complete lineup available for the Paraclete 8-way meet. Larry Miller had to go to school at the time of the event and was replaced by John Hoover. It did not hurt the Golden Knights performance too much having one of the most experienced and successful US Army competitors back in the lineup. In fact, it is difficult to find him on the video without knowing his slot...

The video shows that the Golden Knights are in great shape early in the 2011 season. Team captain Brian "BK" Krause may have some time to focus on 4-way, as the 8-way team will have no serious competition in the USA this year. Even the high-profile Paraclete XP8 lineup could not even get anywhere close to the US Army team this time.

Other 8-way lineups had interesting combinations of 4-way teams. The most colorful one was probably the SDC8XP 8-way team. The four SDC Rhythm XP belly flyers joined forces with the Vertical Formation Skydiving 4-way experts of SDC Standard (Rook Nelson, Mick Nuttal, Will Pesek, Mike Wittenberg).

SDC8XP had a great battle with the two French 8-way teams throughout the 10-round competition. The NSL News will follow up later with some footage of the VFS 4-way competition, which was very exciting and ended with a 1-point victory (241 - 240) of the Chicago team.