FAI Free Flight World Cup 2013

This year had a total of more than 4669 entries in the Free Flight World Cup competitions. This was slightly lower than last year because of weather and flying field problems causing the cancellation of two competitions in Lithuania, two in Slovenia and one class in a French competition just before the World Championships.

F1A was won for the third consecutive year by Mikhail Kosonozhkin of Russia winning the World Cup, ahead of his compatriot Sergey Makarov who had won the 2010 World Cup just before the start of Mikhail’s sequence of wins. A new system of counting four events was introduced for 2013 and Mikhail had won by a clear margin of 4 wins compared to 3 wins and a second by Sergey. Even unde the old system Mikhail would have had a clear lead because his results included the 9 bonus points from winning the largest F1A competition of the year. Third place went to Borislav Bardarov with the same results as Sergey but fewer bonus points. While considering F1A it should be noted with regret that Ukrainian flyer Victor Stamov collapsed and died at the Izet Kurtalic competition in Bosnia Herzegovina. This was during August just after Victor had placed third at the World Championships. He had also won a previous World Championship and was twice winner of the F1A World Cup.

The F1A-Junior top three had all recorded four wins. Petra Meglaj of Croatia was the winner due to bonus points, while Alexey Khoroshev (Russia) took second ahead of Vaclav Papez (Czech Repulic) based counting an extra event to split their equal scores.

The F1B World Cup was won once more by Alex Andrjukov (USA) with a single bonus point lead over Andrey Burdov (Russia). Both flew in the final event, Eurofly in Switzerland, but Andrey could not improve his result. Third place was taken by Sonijoj Sabo of Bosnia Herzegovina.

The F1B Junior World Cup was won by Andriy Stefanchuk (Ukraine) one point ahead of Bojan Gostojic (Serbia) who was one point in front of Thomas Mackus (Lithuania).Thomas had moved up one place from his fourth last year.

F1C was retained by last year’s winner Artem Babenko (Ukraine) with three wins and a second place. With two wins and two second places the bonus points gave second place Viacheslav Aleksandrov (Ukraine) in front of Alan Jack (United Kingdom).

The F1Q winner was the Heikki Salminen (Finland) just in front of Ron Assmuss (Germany). Both had flown at the final event, Eurofly, which finished with a flyoff between these two flyers. Ron could have taken the lead with a win, but it was won by Heikki to maintian his hold on the World Cup Third place went to Andreas Lindner (German), the winner for the previous two years.

F1P Junior was won by Taron Malkhasyan (USA) who was third last year. He started the year well with two wins in February which would prove to be enough to win, but he also added a third win in October. Second and third places went to Russian flyers Dmitry Siromyatnikov and Alexander Kuznecov.

F1E was won for the fifth time by Marian Popescu (Romania). Second and third places were taken by Polish flyers as a result of very good results in the final events of the year which were held in Poland. Frantiszek Kanczok beat last year’s winner Stanislaw Kubit, with equal scores on the basic four events and the result decided on a single point difference on their fifth events.

Christin Winker (Germany) was the winner of the F1E Junior World Cup, beating last year’s winner Zorin Valeanu (Romania) and the 2013 Junior World Champion Konrad Zurowski (Poland).

ORGANISATION

The organisation of the 2013 Free Flight World Cup ran relatively smoothly, with just a few cases of slow return of results and some delaying processing of results by supplying initial results in pdf format which hinders processing the World Cup standings.

The results of a French F1E event did not explicitly list juniors and the coordinator made an error in copying the junior status from the junior list. This then failed to show the clear lead that had been achieved by Christin Winker. It was corrected during the next competition but the error was unfortunate for misleading the keen group of following juniors.

Four events were cancelled. Two in Lithuania, Baltic Cup and Estonia Cup, were cancelled because the flying field was waterlogged. Two events in Slovenia were cancelled, the Ljubljana Cup because of lack of entries and Krka Cup because of failure to get the use of the flying field agreed. At the Poitou competition the F1B and F1C events were severely curtailed and the F1A events lost because of crop problems on the field.

The top three places in each event have been displayed on the FAI web site and updated frequently throughout the year at the address:

http://www.fai.org/ciam-events/world-cups/101-ciam/35330-f1-free-flight-world-cup-rankings

The detailed results have been uploaded to the coordinator’s web site and there are links to this from the FAI web page for both the results of each class or the overall summary.

STATISTICS

The individual events F1A, F1A-Junior, etc show the numbers relevant to that event. The column headed ALL is the total of number of competitors in the full events (F1A B C E Q) which takes account of the fact that juniors have also been included in the results of the full event.

Total number of participants in all competitions: 4669

Number of competitors per country, only those scoring points in 2 or more events:

This page produced by Ian Kaynes