posted Aug 4th, 2006 - The weather was much better yesterday compared to the forecast in Germany. Many teams used the unexpected opportunity to get familiar with the air over the competition site. The new Russian 4-way champion, Sky Panthers Barkli, arrived yesterday and made a few jumps, as well. It gave the NSL News the opportunity to finally replace the previous picture on the team page.

The old team picture was just a collage of four individual portrait images, put together on the computer. The new team picture is a real one and was taken on competition site in Gera. The Sky Panthers Barkli are still on top of the current leaderboard, nobody has changed the original German order of the top teams to date.

French delegation arrived

The whole French delegation arrived yesterday, as well. All members of the three Formation Skydiving teams came by car, and they said that it was a very long trip. The four members of the French 4-way team in the female category explained that they live in four different areas of France, spread out between Paris and Toulouse.

The first thing to do for each particpant is the official registration. The management office was a very busy place yesterday. The NSL News stepped in when French 4-way competitor and 8-way technical coach Erwan Pouliquen was in the spotlight of the camera to take the picture for his world meet passport. His team made a few training jumps later on, and a new team picture will be added to the team page very soon, as well.

World Meet on TV

Friday morning began with a nice surprise in the hotel room. The morning show of the biggest German TV station, ARD, included a well presented introduction of the World Meet 2006. The nationwide public broadcasting guarantees a widely spread message to the general public.

The NSL News mentioned earlier that the German event organizers began with a Public Relations campaign months ago. Mathias Maushake mentioned the efforts yesterday in the interview with the NSL News, and TV production teams were already on the competition site in the past days.

Obviously, the PR efforts already show the first results. The 3-minute section featured the German 8-way team and also showed Arizona Airspeed with the team's famous canopy formation. Freefall action, interviews and positive comments made the event and the participants look good and left a positive image of the sport. This was only the preview of the event, there will be more information for the audience to come.

Sightseeing tour with NSL-TV

The NSL News has received requests for a web camera on the competition site to provide a real live experience for the audience. Unfortunately, the NSL News will not be able to make that happen. However, it was still a good idea to capture some of the live action spontaneously on the NSL camera and upload the video.

NSL News reporter Kurt Gaebel took the video camera and spent five minutes walking around, filming the different areas of the event site and asking a few questions.

Carl Erik Tuv, former DeLand Norgies member, crossed the camera's path at recording time. Italy's former Sinapsi PD member and current 8-way competitior, Marco Arrigo, stopped to comment the upcoming 8-way battle between Italy and Germany. FAI Judge Klaus Wellens had a few words for the NSL audience.

Finally, the NSL News found reigning 4-way world champion Solly Willams at the last stop of the sight-seeing tour in the packing hangar. The former DeLand Majik member and professional coach agreed to meet later again with the NSL News for a live interview in front of the scoreboard.

There was also a ping-pong table set up in the same place, and Airspeed member Thomas Hughes showed off his skills. He was not too excited after missing the other half of the table a few times when the camera was on him. However, the NSL News camera had already caught him earlier with a different activity to keep busy on a slow day.

The sight-seeing video can be viewed by clicking here.