Teacher dives to victory
Yarragon Primary School teacher Kallan Fitzclarence is now a national champion skydiver after winning an event at the Australian National Skydiving Championships recently.
Taking out the sports accuracy landing category, Kallan's event involved jumping out of a plane at more than 4000 feet and attempting to land on a 10 centimetre disc in the middle of a 15 metre target.
While it sounds impossible, he managed to land perfectly not just once, but twice, taking out the national title.
It was the second time Kallan entered the national competition, and the first time he found significant success.
This year's edition was hosted by Kallan's skydiving club Commando Skydivers - based in the Latrobe Valley.
"The good thing I did was not obtain any penalties," he explained.
"This year my game plan was just to not have any penalties and on top of that I jumped really well having four out of my six jumps within one metre."
Kallan, 34, originally got into skydiving back in 2018 after he and his wife wanted to give a tandem skydive a try while on holiday.
Their plans were eventually cancelled, but it planted the seed in Kallan's mind that maybe he should give it a go.
He said the first time he did a jump he was "nervous as hell."
"I don't remember the actual exit of the first skydive," he said.
"All I was doing was concentrating on having good body position and then all of a sudden I was under a parachute. I don't actually remember leaving the plane."
Now an experienced veteran, Kallan is nearing 700 jumps since first getting his start, with plenty more to come.
He said his favourite thing about skydiving and parachuting was "the people."
"It's a really good community. Everyone's close knit, we rag on each other as much as any friends could, no-one's really safe. But we all care about each other really strongly."
Kallan added that being able to call himself a national champion was especially pleasing.
"It's great. It's something where I've always wanted to have some major achievement in sport in my life," he said.
"I've played a lot of footy and didn't have any individual success there. Played a fair bit of cricket, no individual success. This is a sport where it is very niche but I've been able to find something that I'm pretty good at that I don't have to think too hard about, it comes to me pretty naturally."