Anne Soltow’s glider was leading the field all day. Now it is in an actual field and a kilometre short of the finish. The single-seater sailplane looks like a giant alien bug: long slender fuselage, a canopy encasing the cockpit like a single eye, epic wings, 15 metres tip to tip. They were all that was keeping Soltow’s engineless aircraft in the sky – until 10 minutes ago.
The pilot is furious with herself. She had been in the air for nearly four hours and in first place before running out of altitude on the final run back to the airfield. “Landing out” is common in gliding, where testing courses are spread across hundreds of kilometres (think orienteering in the sky). You stay airborne by climbing naturally occurring, upward-spiralling cylinders of warm air known as thermals. Fail to find these and the ground comes to meet you a lot earlier than you would like.
The farmer’s field in which Soltow is standing is in the Czech Republic, host to the Women’s World Gliding Championships. The 27-year-old discovered the sport in 2019 when she moved from Germany to London to study aeronautical engineering. A day win here would, she says, have helped her to finally feel she belonged on the British team. Instead she is so disappointed she can not bring herself to join her teammates for dinner.
With one day of the competition left, the Czechs look set for a clean sweep in all three classes. Seventeen countries are competing, although some – such as Ukraine and the US – can muster a single pilot. Comparatively few women race gliders: in June’s open world championships, three of 115 athletes were women. A women-only championship has run since 1979 to serve (and expand) the female talent pool.
Gliding can be a tough sport to get into for all sorts of reasons, the most obvious being that you need a licence to fly solo. It is completely weather-dependent and immensely time-consuming, a good flight might keep you in the air for eight hours. Once you are competing at an elite level, the quality of your aircraft and equipment can make all the difference – a racing glider can cost anything from £10,000 to £300,000.
So the sense of solidarity at the women’s worlds is notable. Most athletes have been camping on the airfield in Zbraslavice for the entire three weeks of competition; one evening there is a quirky initiation ceremony, where everyone dresses in witches’ costumes and first-timers pledge an oath to their gliding “godmother”, then pretend to ride around on a broomstick.
It is a genuine family event: an athlete’s crew – the person who helps to launch the glider and fetch it if need be – is frequently often their spouse and more than one woman has mounted the podium here accompanied by a dog or a baby.
All the pilots have battled wretched conditions, with local thunderstorms and smoke from Canadian wildfires. Nine flying days – more than half the event – have been scrubbedlost. Even this week’s clear blue skies were bad news because a lack of clouds makes thermals harder to find. No team has struggled more than Great Britain, who have failed to take a podium in any class and are bottom of the team cup rankings.
Britain have a healthy track record at the women’s world championships – one team member, Ayala Truelove, has been overall runner-up twice and took bronze in 2019. But here they have been shown up by the youthful vigour and vibrant spirit of the Czech women and the deep-pocketed professionalism of the French.
Liz Sparrow, Truelove’s flying partner with an international career spanning 22 years, has one word for it: “nightmare”. While each individual is competing for position, flying as a pair or in a group can help tactical decision-making and the hunt for “good air”. One of the GB crew borrows from Star Trek: The Next Generation and describes the Czech team as “a collective consciousness, like the Borg”. By comparison, Soltow has struggled to pair with any British teammates because her borrowed glider, a Standard Cirrus, cannot match theirs for performance. Now, near the end of the tournament, she has formed an alliance with the American Sylvia Grandstaff, a former test pilot for the US Navy, and another, Danish, pilot – a casual agreement to help each other around the course.
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It takes 45 minutes to launch all 50 gliders on the grid thanks to the clutch of tug planes operating on a loop, trailing cable like fish poop. A large gaggle of sailplanes hovers in a thermal near the starting position, but as soon as the task begins, Soltow and her “ragtag group” break away and chart their own course.
Under a small pop-up awning on the airfield, Tim Taylor – Grandstaff’s crew – hunkers over his laptop. He watches their progress and suggests strategy over the radio, his communication clear and precise. Sometimes they lose signal – teams bring their own equipment and the US have a smaller radio mast than most. They lose the Dane, too, at the bottom of a bubble of warm air that fades mid-climb. Neither Soltow nor Grandstaff want to leave her behind – she has to insist.
On the run back home, Grandstaff is in second, and Soltow, once again, in first. Following close behind is Olena Yakymchuk, from Ukraine, who has been living and training in Germany since Russia’s invasion. All Ukrainian gliders have been grounded for the past three years and Russian drones have destroyed and targeted many. Under martial law, Yakymchuk’s husband, Anton, may only leave their home country to crew for her at major competitions: he describes their past three weeks in a caravan as “like a honeymoon”.
Soltow’s glider slides to a gentle stop on the airfield and is quickly towed back to its trailer like a reluctant child. As she begins the process of derigging – removing the wings by pulling them out manually, just like you might a model aircraft – her fellow competitors walk by and ask if she has seen the result. Britain’s last-day win is official – and the sisterhood wants to celebrate with her.
