posted Jan 7th, 2011 - As usual, the NSL News also looks across the pond and checks the other leaderboards. The field of competitors in Canopy Piloting always has several familiar names of the Formation Skydiving community. Shannon Pilcher, Ian Bobo, Jonathan Tagle, Pete Allum are just some examples of overlapping disciplines in the past.

This time, there is a new competitor in both events who the NSL News has not paid much attention to in the past. Alexsander Golovkin's story is related to the three Russian teams in the Open Class competition.

Black Cat, Russia's national champion of 2009 and silver medalist of 2010, has actually a new team member who is relatively new to 4-way competition. Valery Pripilyak has only been in the sport for two years and is already addicted to 4-way. He has trained with Black Cat in the wind tunnel and also last November for three weeks in Spain.

However, Black Cat was not ready yet to compete with him at the Dubai Championship 2011, and Alexsander Golovkin took the slot that he has had for several years.

His 4-way engagement with Black Cat gives him a busier schedule in Dubai, as he is also competing in Canopy Piloting. In fact, he has been one of the top competitors under the open parachute for a while, and he is at least in contention for a Top 10 spot in Dubai.

There is a total of 90 Canopy Pilots competing for the $40,000 jackpot, which is divided into four disciplines (Speed, Distance, Zone Accuracy, Free Style) of $10,000 each ($5,000 - $3,000 - $2,000). Jonathan Tagle, DeLand Fire 4-way world champion videographer of 2006, is currently in 6th place overall, his Fire team mate Ian Bobo is in 12th place, German 4-way videographer Marc Evert follows in 13th, Pete Allum in 16th and Alexander Golovkin in 22nd place.

Dubai Championship 2011		Round1	Round2	Round3	Round4	Round5	Round6	Round7	Round8	Total	Avg
Rank	4-way Russia	P,17,18	M,N,F,3	H,A,6,B	Q,1,C,14	4,10,16	16,O,J,22	K,2,E,11	G,9,8	Total	Avg
4	Russia Gradient Alpha	19	29	-	-	-	-	-	-	48	24.0
5	Russia Black Cat	20	22	-	-	-	-	-	-	42	21.0
6	Russia Illusions	16	21	-	-	-	-	-	-	37	18.5
7	Russia FS3	14	18	-	-	-	-	-	-	29	14.5

Black Cat, with Alexander Golovkin on the other side of the pond, is the second best of the three Russian teams so far. Gradient Alpha came with the same strong lineup to Dubai that won the bronze medals at the Russian Nationals 2010 with a 22.7 average.

Three of the team members (Vladimir Arutyunov, Alexander Tychinsky, Sergey Yalpaev) also won 8-way bronze medals for Russia at the World Championship of Formation Skydiving 2010. Gradient Alpha will not be able to challenge the teams in the Top 3 rankings. However, there will probably be work coming up to keep the distance to Black Cat and win the internal Russian battle.

The third Russian lineup is another pickup team and has as little training as the 4-way female team Illusions. FS3 has Kaktus Hunter's Egor Gusev in the lineup whose team was not ready to compete in Dubai. Kaktus Hunter had a personnel change that the NSL News will cover later.

Last year's other Prygalky member Tatiana Arharova will have her own internal competition with former Prygalky team mate Zhanna Kazakova who competes with Illusions in Dubai. Zhanna Kazakova is up by five points after two rounds...

Yuri Drozdov is the new Kaktus Hunter and was with Ocean 5 before joining Kaktus Hunter. He makes his first meet experience with new team mate Egor Gusev in Dubai. Sergey Kuznetcov completes the lineup of the pickup team. He trained and competed with SynAirgy in 2007. Maria Evteeva is filming FS3.

Egor Gusev said that Dubai 2011 is just a fun project for the FS3 members. He will be happy with a 15-point average. FS3 is doing better than that so far and keeps the Russian 3-team lineup behind the medal rankings intact so far.