Professionalisation XC and H&F

Discipline

Paragliding XC

What do we want ?

A possibility for the youth of today to make a career from the sport in the future. Applies XC and H&F

How do we achieve that ?

1. Increase reach and engagement (technology, social media strategy, format, location, film series)
2. Olympics
3. Major sponsors

Issue category :

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Comments

CIVL Delegate

By Julien Garcia on Mon, 20 Oct 2025 - 00:08

Yes ! On this topic, the Superfinal format which was intended to bring a planetary event to showcase has failed. The technology is there to do better in terms of marketing. Star races around a good TO somewhere in the Alps coupled with live broadcast and interviews is no utopia. Twitch channel with enhanced live report from the gaggle could be arranged.

Organiser

CIVL Delegate

By Flyluchofly on Mon, 20 Oct 2025 - 14:03

I fully agree with this point. A significant part of the evolution of any sport is closely linked to its professionalization. To achieve this, it is essential to establish a strong and coherent communication and promotion structure.
Such an initiative should ideally originate from the FAI and provide unified support across all disciplines — much like the FIA does for motorsports. With this foundation, the sport could attract greater visibility, larger audiences, and consequently, major sponsors. This, in turn, would enable sustainable growth, increased budgets for competitions, and improvements in safety standards.
This aspect is particularly relevant in developing countries, where safety equipment and infrastructure are often difficult to access and prohibitively expensive. It is therefore encouraging to see that this idea is being taken seriously, as it represents a key step toward the responsible and professional development of our sport.

Organiser

By Maxime Bellemin on Mon, 20 Oct 2025 - 19:23

Hi Serge! Before thinking of athlete professionalisation (which I will not discuss in spite of it being the theme here), I would rather first put a lot of efforts to professionalize event organizations. Many of them already are. But profesionnalisation is not only about the money, in my eyes, it is also about behavior or attitude, knowledge, procedures, respect of requirements...

CIVL Delegate

By Moon Policarpio on Wed, 22 Oct 2025 - 05:30

Hello All.

@Christian, since you mentioned the Olympics. FAI, through AFA (Air Sports Federation of Asia), has been capitalising on the Asian Nations in lobbying for Air Sports, specifically Paragliding and Drone Racing for the Olympics through the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) to "Pilot" the sport in various Asian Olympic Events such as Asian Games, SEA Games and Asian Beach Games. The creation of AFA was in Hong Kong early 2017, if I am not mistaken, then there was a gathering between FAI Officials and some Asian NAC in China in late 2017. I was there. The year 2018 Paragliding (XC and Accuracy) was then included in the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia as a demonstration sport. But not all Asain nations send delegations, including my country, the Philippines.

But multiple issues arose at that event, issues such as SAFETY, Weather and the organising of the event itself. After the 2018 Asian Games, no more paragliding. But for the upcoming 33rd SEAGames this December, as Thailand is the host nation, Paragliding is included as a demonstration sport again, but this time only Accuracy.

@Julien, sorry for the delay in What Went wrong about the 2018 Asian Games paragliding events.

CIVL Delegate

By Moon Policarpio on Wed, 22 Oct 2025 - 06:25

Correction, the 2018 Asian Games paragliding is a full medal sport

By christiaandurrant on Wed, 22 Oct 2025 - 14:26

We need a Strategy - from the strategy falls a lot of things including Events (Gday @ MaximeB!).

@Moon great info on progress made in Asia - but I have not seen any progress in my point No 1 Technology. We have the tech to connect our audience to the athletes - and its not a 2D tracker (that rarely works). Its live inflight interviews, drones, course graphic overlays with sponsorship etc. This tech has existed for a while now but we have not incorporated it - so we have no audience. We have no audience so we have no sponsorship. We have no sponsorship so we do not have a professional sport.

There are some really good ideas out there in our community;
- a monetization scheme to reward pilots in the chat etc
- Marco has made good progress in house with little support -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyO4si4QmMEeRgPM_HugjUg?app=desktop

We need to focus our sport more on building the audience (location, track, equipment). I know we have the right people and resources to show the world what it is that we really do.

By Markos Siotos on Sat, 25 Oct 2025 - 00:05

"The revolution will not be televised"

In fact it cannot.
X-Alps, with all the money in the world of paragliding have failed on that.
Sailplanes, with much more money than us (they are invariably "rich kids", flying $250k+ gliders) have tried repeatedly, and have failed again and again.
There may be a way, and new technology (as drones are) could make a difference and could make it possible but the problem is that "big money" would simply never care.
Non-stadium sports as Bicycling and Sailing have made it possible, but there are millions of people you can sell them bicycles and "marine styled clothes" so big money is invested in them.
In paragliding what can you sell to the "general audience" so to make the big money jump in?
And if not for the general audience... we are just 400 people in this group, 2000 people perhaps in CIVL comps with a "casual interest in comps".
Everything goes back to the "Original Sin" of paragliding.
We are just too few to matter....

By christiaandurrant on Tue, 28 Oct 2025 - 17:50

@markos you can absolutely design a star course over a stadium that is on a mountain and I have seen it work extremely well. Flatlands won’t work nor will one way downwind tasks. But at the moment we are not even trying. The technology exists - the military use it every day.