Curtl33 wrote:
While soaring is a sport, and it is competitive, I have a real hard time
viewing the participants as athletes. If you can sit in a lounge chair
for hours on end, playing Nintendo with a joystick, you've got the
athletic stamina and dexterity to be a gold medal soaring pilot.


I don't think you will get a single serious racing pilot in the world to agree
with this assessment.

I think a lot of them would agree, but they'd all point out that
"stamina" and "dexterity" aren't on the list of things it takes to be a
good racing pilot.

And because of this, I don't think of soaring as an Olympic sport. It is
primarily a very mental/intellectual sport, not a primarily physical one
like most (all?) the olympic sports I'm familiar with. It isn't about
flying a sailplane well, for example (like an aerobatic pilot), it's
about guiding the glider to the right place at the right time, meaning
where the lift is.


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Eric Greenwell
Washington State
USA