The skysurfing event at the 2000 X-Games, took place about 30 miles north of San Francisco, in Sonoma, California. The competition actually took place before the rest of the games. The reason, producers didn’t want lose jump and competitions days due to poor weather, like previous years. They also started early, to ensure a finished production of the skysurfing event so it could be the lead-in event for the X-Games on ABC’s ‘Wide World of Sports,’ which broadcasts to 99.4 million households in the U.S.

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Five years when skysurfing entered the games, it was treated like all other sports with live coverage. As it began to evolve, more time was dedicated to the event. Instead of turning around shot footage of the skydives in two hours … producers now have four days to put it together. Let’s face it, with today’s technology to visually watch the skydivers in many different capacities, is not only intriguing, but also aesthetically fascinating to the eye. Not only can we watch the perspective from the aerial photographers, but cameras are also mounted on planes, with the ability to capture the entire skydive.

Competition
This year’s competition also made history with the prizes. In addition to the medals, the first place team received $75,400. A team consists of a skysurfer and a camera flyer (aerial photographer). The Skysurfer rides a specially designed board during freefall, sliding, spinning, twisting and yes, surfing through the sky. The Camera flyer records the performance with a helmet-mounted camcorder but also contributes to the performance interactively –and the team’s overall score–through his or her own creative and athletic skills.

All skydives are tightly choreographed, and rehearsed with literally hundreds of jumps. The skysurfer interacts with the camera flyer in the air, which is also necessary for medalling at the event. As the sport continues to progress, technique, speed, creativity, and making it enjoyable to watch are key to winning. The performance begins as soon as they leave the plane at 13,000 feet. For the first 50 seconds of a 70 second freefall, they’re “on,” moving vertically at about 110-140 mph and horizontally at up to 50 mph, surfing the ultimate wave… the sky.

Looks Easy? Is it Expensive?
Pro Skysurfing is THE most difficult to learn and THE most expensive of all the “extreme” sports. In fact, it’s just about one of the most expensive sports anywhere. Just to equip a team for competition costs $14-20,000 for one season’s worth of custom built gear. The ‘learning curve,’ is extremely steep!

The top pro teams make an average of 500 jumps a year, 10 jumps a day when training. With each jump allowing only ONE-minute max of training time, that’s 10 minutes of training per day! Imagine trying to master a new sport, only practicing one minute each hour!

In the grand scheme of things, skysurfing is a very small aspect of skydiving. It is much more popular in Europe, than here in the states. In fact, during the National Skydiving Competition, in October, only two skysurfing teams registered, while other categories had dozens of competitors. Even though skysurfing represents a very small part of the skydiving community … it is nice to have the sport covered in the national spotlight, and leading off the X-Games!