This started off as a story about incompetence, but I'm beginning
to wonder if there isn't a deliberate attempt to destroy hang gliding
competitions in the US being carried out by Lisa Tate, the USHPA President. Too
strong a statement? I'll let the reader decide.


I first reported the fact that there are no USHPA sanctioned competition for
2007 a few weeks ago while I was attending the fall USHPA BOD meeting (http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4472).
During my term as USHPA Competition Committee Chairman we had four USHPA
sanctioned hang gliding competitions each year. Also we increased the number of
paragliding competitions and this year, based on our work last year, we got four
(and maybe five) USHPA sanctioned paragliding competitions.


When I asked Jim Zeiset, the USHPA Competition Committee Chairman from the
Spring 2006 meeting to the Fall 2006 meeting, what he had done to encourage and
support hang gliding meet organizers, he stated "I believe in free enterprise."
In other words he had done nothing and justified this by saying that that was
somebody else's problem, and if competition hang glider pilots didn't have any
competitions to go to, well that was their problem.


Now, Jim is no longer a hang glider pilot. He's a sailplane pilot. He no longer
flies competition, so it is no personal skin off his nose whether there are any
competitions next year or not. But I'm an active competition pilot and it very
much matters to me whether we have a viable competition season in the US or not
(of course, I can just go fly in Europe and Australia and easily get on the US
National team if there are no meets in the US).


Yesterday, I wrote to the USHPA about how unacceptable I found the current
situation to be and how it represented a failure of leadership. Here is what I
wrote:

Zero USHPA sanctioned hang gliding competitions in 2007.


When I asked Jim Zeiset about this he said, "I believe in free enterprise." What
a completely asinine statement. What a complete failure on his part to support
possible hang gliding organizers. What a complete failure on the part of the
USHPA leadership.


It takes leadership to carry off a successful hang gliding competition year here
in the US. To not provide any encouragement or guidance to meet organizers is to
fail the USHPA members who compete and the organizers.


I can only hope that some one with an ounce of fiber up there at headquarters
has their head screwed on straight.


Your faithful servant,

Now the first response was that there was a new USHPA Competition
Committee Chairman. I already knew this and had already written a short story
about this (see below). But it was the second response that I got directly from
Lisa Tate that was the most interesting and most suggestive of what was really
going on behind the scenes. It appears as though Lisa has an agenda, one that
has no problem with gutting the US hang gliding competition scene. More on that
in part 2 of this article.