From: reich@nosc.mil (Ronald S. Reich) Subject: Competition Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 20:33:54 GMT "COMPETITION" what it means to Ron Reich For those of you that do not know of me and my career as a masters class competitor, here is a brief summary. During my 7 year career, from Mar 1986 thru Oct 1992, I captured well over 100 first place awards and led my team, The Flight Squadron, to become the first World Champions in 1990. I was a sponsored flyer throughout my career and by that felt an obligation to enter all Team and Individual events in the catagories of Preci- sion, Ballet, and Innovative. My preparation and practice sched- ule was intesive. I dedicated myself to developing a level of excellence in all catagories whereby I would practice all day every saturday and sunday from Feb thru Oct every year. During the week I would design stunts and review music. After selecting the music that I felt would present the feeling that I wanted to share with the spectators, I would spend many hours choreograph- ing a routine that would capture the mood and feeling of the music. At one time I estimated that my annual time spent flying and thinking about flying during the year was about 2,000 hours. Thats more than enough on that, now let me tell you why I believe that I was so successful. ATTITUDE, FRAME OF MIND, OBJECTIVE These 3 factors are paramount for the serious Controllable Kite Competitor. ATTITUDE: By nature, I am a caring and sharing type person. I always have been and I always will be. Therefore, whenever I would learn a new stunt or a way to make the kite do something that it was not necessarily designed to do, I was eager to share that concept with other kite flyers. For instance, making the Delta kite slide sideways when it was designed to fly toward its point. Another example was, how to stop the Kite in the center of the wind window so that another kite could fly around it. There are many more examples but that is not what this article is all about. From this factor, ATTITUDE, I have generated a phrase that expresses my feelings. "LEARNING AND SHARING IS THE HEARTBEAT OF KITING" Those of you that know english grammar might say that the use of the word "is" is incorrect and that the proper word should be "are." I intentionally chose the word "is" because I believe that "LEARNING AND SHARING" is actually one word. I either of those is not a part of kiting then kiting will surely die. FRAME OF MIND: This is an extension of ATTITUDE, however, the Frame of Mind that I want to talk about here is that which I have conditioned myself to take when I enter the competition field. So many children when they are required to take a test in school have not been told that the true purpose of the test is to provide the teach with an evaluation of their teaching success. When I was a student my parents instilled in me the Frame of Mind that the school test was not a question of pass or fail for me as much as it was an indicator to the teacher of how well they were getting the information into me. With that in mind, I entered the field with the idea that I was going to demonstrate to the judges how well I had developed the skills that were required in order to execute the compulsory figures and then to demonstrate the skills that I had developed that were not tested by those compulsory figures. The judges job was to compare how my skills had developed relative to the other contestants of that day. My job was to execute the maneuvers better than I had ever done them before so that the judges evaluation would be meaningful to me relative to my progress as a flyer. Only I knew if I had done better than I ever had before. If I did not do better than ever before then only I could determine the value of the evaluation. So I hope you can see that for me, the competition was within myself to do the routine better than ever before and if I did then I would feel that I had won regardless of how my skills were evaluated relative to the other flyers on that day. This Frame of Mind help me root for the other flyers and encourage them to do as good as the could to get the best and most meaningful evaluation possible. OBJECTIVE: There are many different objectives that flyers have in their quest for victory on the competition field. 1. Some are focused on the awards. 2. Some are focused on the demonstration of a product. 3. Some are focused on the pride of beating a fellow com- petitor. 4. Some are focused on the sharing of new and inovative performance concepts. 5. Some are focused on the emotion of the spectators. And others that You may have that are different form these. During my career I received the most satisfaction when my objective was in catagory 5. Secondary to that I enjoyed the feedback from performances in catagory 4. Being a sponsored flyer, I had to perform with the objective of catagory 2. I have spoke to several flyers who had objective number 3. The only time I had objective 1 was the World Cup 1990, 1991 and 1992. Since I have retired from competition, I have focused on sharing infomation and demonstrating for large spectator events. The most rewarding experience I have had in all of my kiting was when 40,000 spectators in Dieppe 1992 would not stop applauding until the Flight Squadron did a 4th routine as an oncore to the 3 previous routines. Smooth Winds, Tight Lines and Good Times, Ron Reich