CORDA member wins Gold medal at the 2008 skydiving nationals

Becky Austin, a consultant at CORDA, won gold with her 4-way skydiving team, Exodus, at the UK national championships this August. The army-sponsored team have been training together since February this year and were overjoyed to win both the Army Parachute Championships and the UK nationals competition.

The team consisted of two Royal Signals officers, an Army doctor and Becky, who is a TA troop commander in the Royal Engineers, and was supported by a camera man, normally a captain in the Infantry. The competition consists of teams of four people who jump out of an aircraft together to link up in sets of choreographed shapes and moves. The formations are drawn from a pool by the judges at the start of the competition and the winners are the team which completes the most over eight jumps. The team practised for this competition by completing over 50 training jumps together from February in all weather conditions.

Winning these medals has given the team the drive to carry on next year and compete in a higher category. They have been helped in this by Honda, who have donated £2000 as prize money to be spent on training next year, following on from their 'Difficult is worth doing' advertising campaign. Finding time to train can be difficult, as team members train on top of their work and military commitments, but having been successful in these competitions they look forward to training together next year.

Becky took up skydiving in 2004 whilst studying for an Economics degree at UCL. She has now completed more than 900 jumps and hopes to be on the women's world record next year.