Melanie Curtis '00 is climbing to the top in the world of competitive skydiving.
By Dick Anderson
Try as she might—and she has practiced this many times—Melanie Curtis '00 simply cannot hit her target. In between jumps on a recent Sunday afternoon, Curtis watches videotape with her Elsinore Adrenaline teammates, critiquing formations and eating a banana, while gearing up for the next jump. She aims the peel toward a garbage pail maybe nine feet away. And after two successful jumps and two successive bananas, she hits the rim with each peel. Splat. "I miss that shot every time," Curtis admits with a smile.
In the world of competitive four-way formation skydiving, however, it's not where you finish, but how you start: The instant you exit the aircraft, two miles above the earth's surface, the next 35 seconds are all that matter. Last October, Curtis's team, Elsinore Adrenaline, broke a tie score in the 10th and deciding round of the 2003 U.S. National Skydiving Championships in Lake Wales, Florida, to win the silver medal in the advanced four-way competition by a single point on the final jump.
"It was a fairy-tale team experience," says Curtis, a second-year competitor and the most junior member of the squad, by a good 1,000 jumps. "Just being on Elsinore Adrenaline put me in this upper echelon of skydivers. I had to step up to the plate, and I made it happen."
Short of the gold, it would seem there's nowhere to go but down, so to speak—but as Curtis sees it, the sky's the limit. "I want to be one of the recognizable forces in competition," says Curtis, who works weekdays as an analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston, in Los Angeles. "I'm a teammate. I'm a competitor. I'm an instructor. Right now my life is the best it's ever been."
Roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles, 45-year-old Skydive Elsinore is the longest-running skydiving operation in North America. The atmosphere is laid-back but competitive, with a loudspeaker right out of M*A*S*H and bathroom-wall humor that speculates about the traveling speed of excrement: "terminal velocity." Every weekend, it rains parachutes all day long, with two Super Otter jump planes making 20-minute runs, carrying veteran skydivers and newbies to 11,000 feet, before emptying each passenger load. For the next 50 seconds—known as freefall—the average diver is hurtling downward at a speed of 120 mph.
"Exit is the best part of skydiving to me," says Curtis, a self-professed freefall addict. "At the start of a four-way, I'm standing outside the plane, and I'm looking down at the ground. I don't know how to tell you how that feels."
Growing up in Watertown, New York, she was exposed to skydiving at an early age because her pilot father (who lived in central New York) owned a small drop zone. "I was never pressured to jump," says Curtis, a natural athlete who played soccer, basketball, and softball in high school. When she was 18, she made her first jump in conjunction with a college visit to Colgate. "I've only made 10 jumps at my dad's house, and I could have jumped for free," she says. Curtis has notched more than 1,400 jumps to date—more than 1,100 of them since moving to California in 2002.
Although the skies were dark over Middlebury when she made her initial campus visit, she chose the College over Colgate and St. Law-rence, and it was "the best thing that ever happened to me." She made two or three drops at a site in nearby Addison, but during her year of study abroad—at James Cook University in northern Queensland, Australia—her mania for skydiving accelerated rapidly. She made her first trip to the closest drop zone on her second weekend abroad: "Within two weekends I had my license," says Curtis, who lived on canned beans and spaghetti to afford the jumps she was making. While in Australia, she logged 60 jumps, including a record skydive for northern Queensland.
After graduating from Middlebury with a degree in economics, she lived in New York City for two years. She checked out the nearby drop zones and did her share of jumps, but she was dissatisfied with her progress. "I wanted to be good," she says, "and four-way was a great adventure."
Fate played a hand in her flight west. After two years in the New York office of Credit Suisse First Boston, she was offered a transfer to Los Angeles, and she all but, well, jumped at the offer. Even before arriving, she traded e-mails with John Hamilton, a world champion in four-way and the owner of Skydive Elsinore. She was determined to get on another team that year, even if it meant maxing out her credit cards.
"John loved my enthusiasm and hooked me up with some people," says Curtis. She ended up jumping with a four-way group at Perris Valley Skydiving—site of the 2004 U.S. National Skydiving Championships in October—but the atmosphere didn't suit her. "I am all about the love," says Curtis, who carried her rig—with its lime, orange, red, and peach-colored chute—over to Elsinore the following season, where she found a new team—and a silver medal.
Can Elsinore Adrenaline repeat this fall? Not entirely, because Adrenaline is a different team now. Founding members Hamilton and Lou Ascione departed to anchor other foursomes as player-coaches. After an extensive audition process, cofounder Tammi Rettig (front center) and Curtis (point) recruited veteran jumpers Jim Browning (tail) and Jon Martens (rear center) to be their teammates. With videographer Shane Rex, the team's fifth member, the new Elsinore Adrenaline started training in mid-February and will meet about two weekends a month between now and nationals.
Formation skydiving is as much science as it is sport, requiring repetition, muscle memory, and the ability to coordinate simultaneously with three partners. It also really helps if you like each other. "You spend so much time together, you've got to be friends," says Curtis. "There are only so many people who are this passionate." Sometimes that passion leads to romance: Curtis started dating Ascione (a professor at DeVry University in Phoenix) after the season concluded.
Between team training and teaching, Curtis has a full calendar until winter. Not that she's complaining—although she wishes more people understood her lifestyle. "People think we have a death wish," she says. "It's more dangerous to drive on the 15 Freeway at 85 miles an hour than to skydive. A little education might change the whole outlook on the sport."
Just don't expect Hollywood to offer any primers on the subject. The opening freefall in Point Break (1991), starring Keanu Reeves, lasts four minutes. "All skydivers make fun of skydiving movies," she says. And then it's off to the wind tunnel for more training.
Dick Anderson is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. He profiled Shawn Ryan '88 ("C.O.") in the winter 2004 issue.