See what happens when Olympic sprinting meets Red Bull Air Race
Turns out high-performance sprinting and high-performing piloting are not all that different
The fearlessness of a ski jumper, the acrobatics of a slope style snowboarder, and the undying need for speed of a downhill skier. Walking into it the Red Bull Air Race World Championships, I was expecting it to be like no sporting experience, but what I saw left me in disbelief. However, it also made me realize that there were a lot more parallels between this sport and other sports.
I'm a former sprinter, and while I was in the hangar talking to Pete McLeod, the only Canadian in the Red Bull Air Race master class, he realized who I was and commented that he actually used a lot of sprinting examples to help me understand a lot of what was going on. For instance, sprinters are naturally gifted and possess speed. So what separates these sprinters by 10ths and 100ths of seconds?
Details.
Your body is your vehicle.
Watch world-class sprinter learn from Canadian world-class pilot:
It must be fed and tuned in a bunch of innovative and efficient ways to separate the best from the very best. The same goes for competitive pilots. They must tune their vehicle to suit them in numerous tiny ways for them to separate themselves, but it could come down to the 1,000ths and 10,000ths to be able to separate competitors.
He walked me around his plane and showed me the inside. I kept my hands behind my back and did not touch a thing. There is no way I wanted to be touching this high-powered gadget that was about to be soaring through the skies. I didn't even like people touching my spikes, and I was only in the air for fractions of a second.
It looked and even smelled — Fast.
I met McLeod the night before I was personally going to be flying through the skies on The G-Flight Experience, where I would actually be getting into one of those planes. And, actually being next to the plane made me more scared than I already was. That fear really dissolved on the day of the flight, however.
My pilot for the flight would be Dario Costa, who was very thorough in his pre-flight instructions of what to expect and the safety procedures. And once you're up in the sky, yes, you can end up upside down within a few tenths of a second, but overall, it felt pretty safe. We had so much space in the sky to ourselves, and after every maneuver he'd do a quick check with me to make sure I hadn't threw my guts up or suffered whiplash.
It was cool to be able to experience the event and a fraction of what the pros actually do. I gained even more of an appreciation of their abilities, and more of an understanding of how brave these pilots actually are.
Watch Anson Henry hold on to his lunch in a G Flight experience:
The actual competition didn't disappoint. It really had the feel of the 100m at the Olympics. The scene was set for the favourites to battle it out to the end to win the World Championships. The USA's Michael Goulian; The Czech Republic's Martin Sonka; Australia's Matt Hall — battling through the elimination avoiding elimination to win it all.
Fans on the edge of their seats hoping they all make it to the final 4, as the best pilots in the world attempt to ruin the narrative. It was just like watching Bolt, Gatlin and De Grasse battling through the rounds in Rio, with the best sprinters in the world trying to get in the way. And Sonka's reaction when he won it all — enough to give you chills.
I would love to see The Red Bull Air Race competition come to Toronto. The pilots flying over Lake Ontario with the CN Tower and city line in the distance — wow. I would love to experience this all over again.