A team of skydivers from Nottinghamshire is celebrating winning the title of British Indoor Skydiving Champions this weekend, following a close battle with the reigning national champions at the event in Basingstoke.
Chimera, which comprises of four members from the Vale of Belvoir area, is now the highest ranked indoor skydiving team in the country and is therefore invited to represent Team GB at the upcoming World Cup of Indoor Skydiving, to be held in Belgium in April.
Laura Hampton (Bingham), Sarah Ashworth (Harby), James Woods (Harby) and Will Cooke (Langar) have been competing together for the past seven years, though travel restrictions in recent years have impacted the team’s training plans and reduced the amount of time they have been able to spend with their coach, Niklas Hemlin, who resides in the USA.
In spite of this, the team put in an impressive performance at the competition, beating the reigning British champions NFTO and new team Meraki to the top spot.
Speaking of the competition, Laura Hampton, who has the position of Outside Centre in Chimera, said: “Winning the gold medal was really a dream come true! Ours is a sport that requires a huge amount of dedication and we’ve all been working hard to improve our own skills and our skills as a team for years. To be able to say we’re the British champions is amazing”
Chimera trains regularly at Notts skydiving centre, Skydive Langar, where over 33,000 skydives were completed in 2021 – in spite of the centre being closed for part of the year through lockdown.
Skydive Langar sponsors Chimera, and Operations Manager Josh Carratt said: “We’re very proud of Chimera and so pleased to see their hard work pay off in this way. As well as training at Langar, the team also provides coaching to jumpers, from those learning formation skydiving skills from scratch, to other teams, to larger skydiving groups.
We’ve got an exciting calendar of events lined up for 2022 and it’s awesome that some of those are being led by the British champions”
The British Indoor Skydiving Championships was hosted at iFly in Basingstoke, where 52 teams and individuals gathered to compete in a variety of skydiving disciplines including formation skydiving, dynamic, freestyle and vertical formation skydiving.