He is from Saint-Etienne but also specialist of freefly. His name may not mean anything to you, but Grégory Crozier is a skydiving expert. At 40, he received the medal from the city of Saint-Étienne on Thursday. “It’s an amazing honor“, explains the two-time world champion from Loire. “For me it is very valuable“, he continues on our antenna this Friday morning.
France Bleu Saint-Étienne Loire – Before you started freeflying, this discipline which consists of performing tricks in the air, how did you discover freefall?
Grégory Crozier – My father was in aeronautics, he did rowing and hot-air ballooning, as a hobby of course, but he still did a fairly high level of it. And me, it’s watching all the Hollywood movies of the 1990s when I was a teenager, there were scenes of completely crazy free fall. I was maybe a little bit of a daredevil, a bit of a stuntman around the edges. But me, actually, it spoke to me right away and I immediately put myself in the shoes of the hero I was seeing and I wanted to do the same thing.
When did you make your first jump?
The first jump for me was when I was 16, in Saint-Galmier. I had prepared everything but I had to wait two years between the moment when I had decided to do it and the big day. In fact, I was still quite terrified. I suspected that I had to go beyond this fear, but it’s true that I was still scared, even during the following jumps. Today, I soon reach 9000.
The competition came later, right?
Yes, after about ten years, I settled down with my partner Karine Joly who became world champion with me. And in fact, remaking the world one evening, she asked me if I had any regrets in life. I didn’t seem to have any, but I had never competed in skydiving, which was the case in many other sports. She said : “It’s too bad, you have to do it“. So we got into it. And since we were maybe a little older than the others, we may have worked harder than the others. We were 26 at the time, we took it really seriously and we immediately beat other teams that had already existed for longer than us.
How do we train for freeflying?
There are two things that are important, the first is the mental imagery part, linked to repetition alone. You have to project yourself enormously on the jump you are going to make, imagine it, try to seek out the sensations by closing your eyes. And then there is the preparation in the wind tunnel. So we often go to Lyon or Aix-Marseille to train. I hope that one day there will be one in Saint-Étienne as well, but we will also train in the wind tunnel, more for individual skills. It is to be able to be even stronger and more competent.
Do you manage to live off that with your partner today?
So it remains, it remains a profession of passion, that is to say that we manage to survive. But it’s not a job to make money. We don’t have the budgets of our football friends yet (laughs).
You move around the world. You have more than 60,000 followers on Instagram, you travel to Egypt, you jumped above the pyramids, but also in Dubai. Does it help to make your sport a little more visible?
Yes that is the goal. I hope people are already discovering the word free fly this morning. Since we had this title of world champion, we have been invited to TV shows, we also come as guests to major skydiving events… So yes almost all the time now we promote our sport at nationally and internationally.
You will also be in Chicago in two months, to try to break a world record.
Yes, just before Saint-Étienne, I was in Prague, right next to Prague, to select the paratroopers who will be coming with us to Chicago at the end of August, from August 20 to 27, to try to break the world flight record large formations. In 2015, 164 skydivers jumped from seven planes and flew upside down before joining in the air. We are going to try to do better with paratroopers in nine planes.
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