Let me close with a vision for contest soaring; perhaps reversing my charge to talk about the past with facts and instead talk about the future with hope.

I love contest soaring. Selfishly, it’s very time-efficient – you go and fly on days you wouldn’t get out of bed on a safari. And those weak days have produced many of my best flying memories. Imagine you could go to a place with a great reputation for flying conditions, there is a weatherman who produces a daily briefing, three smart people spend all morning figuring out just where the best place to go is, then you fly around the course with 50 of your best buddies; there is someone manning the phones to come get you if you land out, and you finish it all with a beer and Mexican food.  Isn’t that a dream? No, it’s a contest!

Contests are where you get together with the best and most committed pilots in the US. It’s a very welcoming community. I have made lifelong friends though contest flying. Of course contests measure you. Any sport gets boring just for the enjoyment. What hooks us on contest soaring is this pathological urge for self improvement.

And that’s their function and importance for our sport. Where is the knowledge of how to guide our amazing machines through the sky to unimaginable speeds and distances, learned, refined, measured, and then passed on? In contests. And where is the knowledge of how to do all that safely also passed on? In contests. Contests are the vital place where our sport develops and is passed on. Without contest flying, these skills and this knowledge will be lost.

Once I proposed that we change the official purpose of contests to add, beyond “selecting the champion,” “for the assembled pilots to enjoy and advance the art of cross-country soaring.” Like many other bright ideas, the motion didn’t pass, but I think the underlying philosophy is there and should continue.

Contest and cross-country soaring are our sport. All of our gliders were built for speed. The natural progression of our sport should be from license, to thermaling, to cross country, and then to contests – without losing 95% at each step of the way.

I dream that every year there is a Region 7 contest, in which every pilot and glider in the region shows up, including the ASK21 and 1-26s. We get together to have a big party, but also to learn from each other; to learn how to be better cross country pilots and safer cross country pilots.  Nobody should feel “contests are beyond me” or “contests are unsafe for me.” They should feel “contests are where I will learn to be better, and see all my friends, and learn to be safer.” I sense there was some of this feeling in the 60s, when new pilots routinely went to contests with a fresh silver c in their hands. I’d like to recapture some of that feeling. Maybe we should stop calling them “contests” and “races” and instead call them “meets.”

That’s the experience in our most successful contests now, including Newcastle, Perry, the Seniors, Mifflin and its mentoring program. We need more like that!

Then the real golden age of contest soaring will have arrived.