An article for Onboard Magazine, Summer 2016, about the Coupe Icare Festival in France. Onboard Magazine is aimed at "super-yacht professionals" in the Mediterranean
"This could only happen in France," mutters the man in front of me at the bar, peering at his beer. It is green, and served in a re-usable plastic cup that costs a refundable two euros. Lose the cup, lose your two euros.
Beer dyed a wacky green colour is not the only thing about the annual Coupe Icare Festival that "could only happen in France". Held each year in mid-September to mark the end of the summer flying season in the Alps it attracts 100,000 like-minded souls over a four-day weekend. They come to celebrate their shared passion for all things in the air: paragliders, hang gliders, wingsuits, speed wings, paramotors, balloons, sail planes, even on occasion rocket-fuelled Jetmen from Dubai.
They crowd into the tiny village of St Hilaire du Touvet, which sits on a grassy plateau high above the Isere Valley. Half an hour to the west is the city of Grenoble; day-trippers come by shuttle bus or ride up the old-style mountain railway that climbs steeply up to St Hilaire from the valley below.
Once up, the feeling is of being ensconced in a nest, looking out across the valley towards the mountains beyond. Behind, the limestone bulk of the Chartreuse dominates, its thousand-foot cliffs forming a perfect backdrop to this most Alpine of scenes. The summit of the mountain also provides a perfect launchpad: for paraglider pilots who hike up at dawn to take off and fly slowly down, drifting like butterflies; or wingsuit pilots who Base jump from the cliffs before swooping across the festival at 200km/h, opening their parachutes with a bang once out in the safety of the valley.
At the heart of the festival though is a spectacle the like of which you will see nowhere else in the world. Like a Rio Carnival of the sky, the Masquerade Launch at the Coupe Icare, held on the Saturday and Sunday, is a riot of colour and imagination.
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| © Ilan Ginzburg |
In front of a crowd of thousands paraglider and hang glider pilots take off in fancy dress, competing for the coveted first prize, yes, but mainly simply setting out to take part and elicit the biggest cheer from the appreciative crowds.
"Allez, allez, alllez!" roar the spectators as a man dressed as a toy plane, complete with propeller, pulls up his paraglider and starts running towards the edge. That edge is quite something: the launch may be smooth astroturf, but the cliff at the end is very real. Launch marshals watch the wind and conditions, and direct the show. It is a carnival atmosphere but safety is still paramount. They will hold the show if the wind isn't right.
Loping off in giant strides the flying toy plane finds his rhythm and takes off smoothly into the air, the wind filling his glider and carrying him instantly aloft. He turns to wave at the crowd below and flies a full circle, looking down on hundreds of upturned faces. The smiles say it all as the people shield eyes against the sun. This is not your average Saturday afternoon paragliding, nor is it your average fancy dress parade.
The beginning
The roots of this carnival of the air stretch back to the May 1974 when three hang glider pilots first flew from the plateau here. Hang gliding was in its infancy – the sport started life in California in 1971 and spread from there – and every flight was still experimental. One of those three pilots was Daniel Pernoud, who also happened to be president of the St Hilaire tourist office. Spotting the potential, Pernoud set about organising the first Coupe Icare that September. The name, Icarus Cup, echoed the Flight of Icarus – the boy who flew too close to the sun in Ancient Greek mythology.
Pernoud invited 50 pilots and gave them a challenge: to take off and land on a spot in the valley. The traffic literally came to a stop on the main road between Grenoble and Chambery. Two years later, there were 200 pilots and two landing targets, a red one for even numbered pilots, yellow for odd.
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| © Bruno Lavit |
A decade later and the weekend gathering could call itself a festival. Organisers added a film festival, a secondhand market, trade tents. And then paragliding arrived. With the birth of this second aerial discipline many thousands of people found it was suddenly easy and cheap to take to the air. While hang gliders have a triangle-shaped rigid frame and the pilot lies face down, head forwards, in a paraglider the pilot sits back, as if in an easy chair. Paragliders are also lighter and easier to transport and assemble than hang gliders. Combined, this all meant a paragliding boom across the Alps.
The Coupe Icare rode that wave well into the 1990s, adding festival-style circus tents to accommodate visitors who came to party in the festival atmosphere as much to fly, and building the Masquerade Launch into a TV spectacle that is today broadcast across France. Typically the Coupe Icare now sees 6,000 pilots and 100,000 spectators.
Now, it attracts pilots from across the world, keen to take their place and showcase their skills in front of the biggest crowd they'll ever see. Acrobatic paraglider pilots jump from helicopters and tumble down to within metres of the crowd; speed wing pilots launch from above and loop the loop; paramotors – a paraglider with a propeller on the pilot's back – fly spectacular slaloms around inflatable pylons, show-smoke trailing behind them.
And it is not only pilots who come. Artists and musicians arrive too. One, Tura, an artist from Brazil, is famous for his record-breaking lantern displays. He and his team in Brazil spends months hand-making thousands of paper lanterns, which he then hands to crowds gathered on one of the launches late in the evening. As the stars come out above he lights the first balloon, and then that one lights the next, and so on. Soon, hundreds, thousands of paper lanterns fill the sky, as if the heavens have come alive. The scene is magical, especially if you have had one or more of the Coupe Icare's infamous green beers.
Elsewhere, jazz bands play until midnight, while the thump of the DJ pulsates well into the early hours. Restaurants and bars, suaully quiet unless at the peak of the ski season, thrum with conversation and people from all over the world.
One vast marquee hosts the most prestigious air sports film festival in the world. Hundreds crowd inside to watch their friends and colleagues spin and fly on the big screen – whether paragliding from the summit of Everest or flying kites above the beaches of the Mediterranean, all aspects of flying for fun are included. GoPro has a lot to answer for.
By Sunday evening it is all over. The trade stands are dismantled, the last pilots have flown down to the valley below, and the crowds are heading home in snaking lines of traffic. Once more, people are Earth-bound and the Coupe Icare and its dreams and packed away for another year, once more.
Coupe Icare 2016, 22-25 September 2016, www.coupe-icare.org
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