posted Sep 25th, 2006 - Arianna de Benedetti's NSL Profile was recently updated. Sinapsi PD's Center Outside of the past three World Meets in France 2003, Croatia 2004 and Germany 2006 has been in pursuit of a place on the winners' podium ever since she joined the team. Her profile story has shown how eager she was to win a medal.

She finally succeeded in her third attempt, together with her Sinapsi PD members Pete Allum, Luca Marchioro, Livio Piccolo and Luca Poretti, and joined Natasha Montgomery and Lise Aune as the only female medal winners at world championships in the history of 4-way Formation Skydiving competition. Her update begins after the World Meet in Croatia 2004:

"Here I am, September 7th 2006, two years later, to update my profile. Two more years have gone by, 1044 more team jumps are in my log book. Yes, it might look crazy, but I still count every single one of my jumps. One more world meet, and finally a medal. But lets start from the beginning!

After the World Meet in Croatia 2004 we met with the team. Actually, it was not very long after the meet that I already thought I would want to keep training. Maybe it would be a light season in 2005 to recover a bit and then focus on the 2006 season and the World Meet. So, that was pretty much my suggestion.

Livio and Luca felt the same way, and we kind of agreed with that plan. Only Marco had different feelings. He was very tired, not about jumping but about the team. He told us that he was not willing to continue with us.

A few weeks of confusion followed that meeting for the three of us. Actually, "panic" is probably a better word to define the mental situation, I guess. We wanted to continue, but we couldn’t think of anybody in Italy that could replace Marco, and we were really not willing to start all over again with a new young member, even if it was a talented guy. We still had some energy, but not enough for such a project.

So, we were thinking and thinking, and I will always remember when the final idea came up. I was talking to Luca on the phone, it was late in the evening, and I was driving my car in Rome. We were still talking about "somebody in Italy", and at a certain point I said, why must he be from Italy???

I mean, we just need somebody who didn’t compete in Croatia! Well, there where the Norgies and the XL members, and the name of Pete Allum came up as the best option for a lot of reasons! Now, I am not the kind of person that sits there to think it over and over if I believe it is good to do it. So I just took the phone, and I called Pete!

I guess it was a very strange phone call for him because I was so exited about the idea, and I talked to him for ten minutes - no stop and with an incredible speed - in Italian of course! I talked about what happened to our team and about the idea we had, about the plans for next two years, about the possibilities we had, and much more.

When I stopped talking for a second to breath, Pete told me: "I am sorry, but I don't really understand what are you asking me!" Then I said: "I am asking you if you want to jump with us, Pete!" His reaction to the whole thing sounded a little bit confused to me, but it was also very positive. He liked the idea a lot, and he just asked me to give him a few days for a definitive answer.

It obviously worked out, and we started training in DeLand on January 17th, 2005. It was fun, there were a lot of new things, it was a new feeling with new energy! Many things looked good from the beginning, many others we needed to get used to, especially Pete, I guess. However, he said that he was having a great time and that he liked the jumps with us a lot!

We had a very light season in 2005 since we had to figure out a lot of bureaucratic stuff to have Pete competing for Italy. We didn't want to spend the whole time jumping, so we agreed to do something around 300 jumps and then increase the efforts the year after.

Well, we surely did that. Finally, we had trained for two years, and we improved a lot! We reached a consistent 23.0 average level. I read at the NSL website that we even have the highest season average of a team in 4-way history, that sounds pretty good, too.

When we arrived in Germany for the World Meet 2006 in Gera, we knew that we had fair chances to compete for every step on the podium. USA, Russia and France were there, and all of us were very good teams. We knew that it could be next to nothing between coming in 1st or 4th!!!

We got the bronze medals. Good or not - that was what we had and what we were able to achieve in that competition. I am not complaining about it. It could be better, but it could also be worse. We made mistakes that you can't do if you want to win, so that's fine.

My opinion is that, at the end, how you perform in competition is what you are able to do, because that's what you have trained for. I could say that we have done better in training or at other competitions that didn't count so much. But in the end I trained two years for the World Meet - not for the Shamrock or for the Italian Nationals. Two teams were able to score higher than we did in those few competition jumps in Germany. Well, this means that they deserved the higher places they won.

The only thing that I'm really sad about is the fact that we could do only five jumps. That was really bad because when you train for years, giving everything that you can for THAT competition, I think you deserve at least to do all rounds! I think that you deserve the conditions that guarantee you to finish the meet with all ten rounds. It is really sad that, besides the weather that was really woeful, the organization was not good enough to guarantee a fairer competition.

But, anyway, I am happy! I am happy about the bronze medal and the meet experience. I am happy about some beautiful people that I met on my way. I am happy about the training, happy about what we achieved as a team, and I am happy with what I achieved as a person.

I really hope that my team mates feel the same way and that they can appreciate what we did together. We are all different, but I know that all of us gave it 100% in our own ways. Even if it turned out that we didn’t deserve the sword, I think that we can be happy with everything we did.

Here we go again, same question at the end: What now? I can only say that I hope there will be reason to update this profile again some day in the future!"