TFN Talks with Team Airwax
We sat down to talk with the legendary Team Airwax, Greg Crozier and Karine Joly, the French skydiving duo who have reigned the past decade of freefly skydiving sport as 4x World Class Champions, 4x National Champions and 4x world Record Holders, to talk about their history, most memorable jumps and life on the road.
Where did you grow up and what inspired you to go into the sport of skydiving?
Karine: I grew up in Lyon, France. Big fan of skiing and the natural environment, the sensation of sliding and speed, always loved roller coasters, and was always fascinated by the beauty of the sky. I got given a tandem jump from my family on my 18th Birthday and when I landed I was completely hooked on it! I felt home.
Greg: I grew up in Saint Etienne. My dad was a pilot for small aircraft. I was used to taking little flights with him. Once we landed in a place that was hosting skydivers. I was 10 and it was the first time I saw canopies in the sky. I had no idea about what was happening before they opened their canopies. I started to see all of these cool action movies about skydiving like Drop Zone, Terminal Velocity and the holy grail: Point Break. I saw all the freefall scenes and realized that this was the coolest sport ever for me: SKYDIVING !
You two are not only one of the top freefly skydiving teams on the planet, you are also a couple, how did you two meet and what made you decide to start competing together?
Karine: We met at a drop zone in my home town Lyon, we were both already sport skydivers. One day, we were talking about our lives, Greg told me he had a big regret of not having pushed skydiving to competition. I told him it's bullshit to have regrets that young, we were 27, so we decided to start a team and see where it would lead us.
Where did the name Team AirWax come from and who designs your incredible costumes (like the indigenous inspired bodysuits you rocked at the World Championships in Australia)?
Karine: We made the decision to start competing in 2009. But brainstorming and finding the name for our team happened in October 2008.
We wanted to find a name us and our video operator would agree on and find appealing. When we decided to try competing in 2009, we found a video operator who was a friend, one night we were brainstorming on names, we wanted something that linked us all: the sea at the time (Greg was a skipper, I was fan of surfing and a beginner at it, our video operator was a semi pro windsurfer). We ended up tripping about the "sex wax" product, we loved the boldness of it and decided to honor that genius Mr Zog by changing Sex with Air, "Air Wax" it was!
Our discipline, "freefly" is an artistic category. But for some reason no one was really pushing the boundaries of creativity when it came to costumes. we went for a theme. When we learned the World Championship was going to take place in Australia, I started to look into the history of the country and found out about the heavy story of the Aboriginal people of Australia. They really are our true ancestors, and have suffered a lot from the colonialism. We were inspired to pay a tribute to them. As I dug more into their culture, I got inspired by their rituals with the body painting to create the patterns on our suits and found a way to imitate this painting on their body by tracing white lines and dots on a red suit (red for the dark skin and as the symbolism of the Australian earth).
Then I put some adhesive lines on our helmets and painted in red above, as a stencil technique. because it was home made it didn't look that nice close up, but it would do the job with the distance we have in the sky. When we arrived at the opening ceremony, an Aboriginal man came passing through the athlete with a ritual using smoke from plants to purify us. It gave me goosebumps, it was the best omen we could get from the universe!
Did you ever think that one day you would become 4x record holders and 4x national and world class champions in your sport? Do you choreograph your routines together or is one of you more instrumental in this area in particular?
Karine: Absolutely not! All I knew was that I was completly in LOVE with this sport and I wanted it part of my everyday life.
For the routines, Greg is the technical expert, knowing and anticipating the difficulties of figures. As for me I'm the creative one, always coming with crazy ideas, sometimes to hard to make them happen in the sky but we managed to make compromises on each side and with a bit of struggle, we ended up with that routine we flew in Australia.
Greg: When I think about it now, this whole experience is much like a boxing fight. You start to think only after you survived the last round. We put everything we had into this for 10 years. We missed endless cool events and boogies but not a single competition or record. For sure today we are extremely proud of all of these achievements. About Routines. We made all of them, but they have a way of executing themselves.
It takes years to build enough skills and fill your bag of enough tricks so you can be happy of your routine. (I am Kiddin'... you are never 100% happy :) )
Recipe is: a lot of observing other flyers and teams, a lot of analysis and tests, a lot of patience and a zest for total commitment and hard work.
Two of the most visually breathtaking skydives I have seen you two do were over the pyramids of Giza in Egypt and over Mount Uluru / Ayers Rock in Australia. How did those jumps come about and what was it like to do each one of them?
Karine: We had planned to visit a bit Australia after the competition, especially Alice Spring, the city in the center of the continent, to see the famous "Ayers Rock". Greg went there in 2003 and wanted to find a way to convince a leisure helicopter pilot to drop us discreetly next to the site ... During the World Meet as we stood in our Aboriginal inspired suits and executed the routine, a volunteer from the event came to find us and told us he would love to invite us to jump over Ayers Rock. As it turned out, he had set up his own little drop zone for tandem activity in Uluru! An emblem of the Australian outback, this famous monolith is above all, a great sacred site for the Aboriginal people of Australia: It's an imprint of ancestral times that shows traces of memories to unite the present with the origins.
When we arrived on site, Uluru stood there in the middle of nowhere, as a kingdom in this great desert ... the mystical air about it reinforced by its orange-red color which changes according to the sun, turning purple in half-light. It’s real poetry... Sam, the owner of Skydive Uluru, sent up a plane just for us! Because the site is protected, we could only jump outside the reserve, but we were gifted a superb "fly by" during the climb ...
What an honor it was to be there ... it was a bit like a meditation and a "thank you" for what Australia had offered to us. The ground was a mixture of intense red earth-sand, the sun set on this large plain full of history, we savored the present moment ... It was like a return to the roots, to the roots of humanity.
As for Egypt, well this is another Big story:
Ok first of all: how on earth are we allowed to jump on these icons of humanity's history? !! It still remains a mystery, but I can only express immense gratitude for the achievement since it allowed me to live one of the most moving moments of my life! This civilization has fascinated me from a very young age: how men of such an ancient era, had developed such finesse and precision in design, architecture, medicine, astrology ... how so many questions still remain unanswered today ...
It was a trip we would have loved to do one day, but we never thought of going there like that on the go and even less with this crazy opportunity! We met Mahmoud in Kenya, while talking he told me that he was going to organize jumps on the pyramids, I said to myself "wow, a site where we will see the pyramids in the distance" it's great! And there we were!
February 2019, we joined Ewan Cowie at the hotel in Cairo where the general briefing took place. We were shown an area at the bottom of Khéphren's pyramid and we were told that the landing will be just there ... Still at that time we told ourselves "they are kidding"! There were only to be 1 out of 2 jumps max per day (over 3 days) but we understood why quickly enough: the logistics and the cost of the operation were enormous. Early in the morning, a bus took us to the military airport. We walked through a line with several C-130 lined up (it's not every day you see that!) In addition to doing a special jump, we had the honor of getting into this legendary, gigantic plane: the Hercules!
Ready to take off, we all sat down in this huge space and climbed up to altitude like rockets! 4500m, the door lifted up, we stood in a chain ready for action. The exit felt like a big slap in the face as the plane was going quite fast, we had a plan to execute a surf picture in freefall so we stayed focused. I couldn’t really see the ground. It was only as we separated that it was all revealed to me. There was the city, then the clear limit with the sand and just below me: the great pyramid of Cheops! ... I said out loud in my helmet "it's not possible", and tears of joy came ... I felt so full of gratutide!!
Under canopy, it was clearly the most majestic flight I had ever done! ... Directly over the top of the great pyramid, how many humans have observed this wonder from this point of view ?! I could go and touch the stones with my feet if I wanted to, it's crazy, we were literally above a UNESCO site! How was this possible?? We landed on the carpets in front of Khephren. We packed our canopies in the middle of the Giza site.
We felt a bit like extraterrestrials, arriving from the sky and dropping on these giants of humanity, creating a huge anachronism ...
I will never forget how i was barely out of my AFF (Accelerated Freefall) course and you two asked if I wanted to jump with you. I later said it was like Michael Jordan asking if you wanted to play basketball with him. From the day I met you at a boogie in Kenya it struck me how humble and genuinely kind you both are in a sport that can be infamous for its overblown egos. How do you become world champions and still stay so grounded and supportive of others in the sport?
Karine: Waow, thank you for such a compliment!! I don't see why we would ever have the right to become assholes having achieved a certain level of fame, in any activity, especially skydiving! As the progression in our sport is limitless, I don't think you can reach a point where you can say I know it all, and drop the mic. It's just a matter of giving to the others what you would like to recieve, it's a basic way of life. I am super happy of what we've achieved and proud of all the obstacles we overcame but that doesn't change my relationship with others. And because we've learned a lot on our own, specially dealing with the stress, we are happy to give tips and share our experience with anyone interested in progression. I think there is so much to get for everyone if we manage to create a virtuous circle rather than putting yourself in an inaccessible state, sharing very carefully your knowledge. We've all experienced the amazing potential of being supported. If you think you can make someone's day brighter by doing something easy for you, you would be an asshole not to do it!
Greg: A lot of jumpers over 1000 jumps seem to have driften away from the magic of this sport, but you'll definitely see the sparkles in a beginner's eyes, that's why we always love jumping with rookies! I always feel so privileged to jump and I love lifting up people to a higher level.
What are you favorite canopies to fly and why?
Karine: Icarus JFX safe and fun. I feel comfortable flying in every new places as we switchconstantly of drop zones. I don't stress out if I have to land out of the DZ, and at the same time, I can be agressive with it and have a nice swoop when I want to. Perfect combo for me!
Greg: I'm definitely in love with the Icarus LEIA! Her behaviour is one of a kind, it feels like she's connected to me and we can do anything. Under canopy becomes an amazing ride down, my favorite roller coaster.
If you could open up your own drop zone anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?
Karine: I would not want to take such responsibility, but it would definitely be somewhere sunny and sandy, offering a mind blowing view!
Greg: On a coast of South America, for its nice weather and sweet vibes.
What are the benefits and challenges of living the nomadic lifestyle for you two?
Karine: Benefits: meeting a lot of cool people, discovering places, cultures, food. Not paying rent so you can use that money to enjoy your travel! Challenges: finding good wine in foreign countries ;) There are not many, except small things like not being able to cook a basic healthy meal.
Greg: Human side of it: getting to meet people we would never cross path with otherwise. Challenge: logistic of moving with a lot of gear and the logistic of all those travels and tunnel camps.
What advice would you two give to the new generation of skydivers who want to rise to the top in the discipline of freeflying?
Karine: Be ready for FULL commitment: time, money, patience... build a strong mind and body, make sure you set clear goals and go climb the stairs to success, the steps wont be equally sized, some of them will be way harder to take, but if you want it, you can get it! It's just a matter of strategy. Go train in a wind tunnel if you can, find a good balance between this and the sky, don't waste too much time indoor though. Set your objectives step by step. And throw yourself in the arena, ready for battle.
Greg: talk a lot with your team mates to be sure you are on the same page reguarding your objectives. Because there will be a lot of frustrations (time, energy, money), so you need a solid crew on yourside.
How do you spend your downtime, when you are not skydiving?
Karine: We like scubadiving, when we have the opportunity. I like hiking, going for a run along the sea coast, discovering new things (from a good wine to an interesting documentary, music, book, movies...)
Greg: Trying to boost the media side of our sport which is very poor at the moment. Even with a World Champion title, being heard by the rest of the world can be a challenge. We are in such a cool sport, I want to do whatever I can to spread the word and maybe contribute to make skydiving more visible.
What is next for TeamAirwax? Where do you see yourselves in five years?
Karine: We are in a beautiful sport but it's still very poorly represented through the media. If there is an accident on any drop zone, you will see a journalist jumping out of a bush to make a report on every newspapers or TV, but when we break a world record or become world champions we have to run after them so we can have something published! So we really want to try and help foster better communication in our amazing world. Having the opportunities to jump over mind blowing places is helping to built a strong bank of images to show and share further than our community circle. We are trying to use our titles to get to meet more people, in media and politics to get a chance to talk about our sport and raise awareness and their interest by changing the negative associations they may have with skydiving. Getting more contacts and spreading the word.
In 5 years??! Haha I have never been able to answer that question in my life, I'd rather go with the flow of the universe, following my heart and deep wishes, so they may evolve. I try to stay in tune and be faithful to them, to me.
Greg: I am starting to train some teams, both indoor and outdoor and it really feels like the appropriate continuity of all those years of competition. We've learned so much about the most efficient way to train, what exercises to do in specific order, how to manage stress and everything, I am willing to help the most motivated people in the sport reach for their dreams!