15:00 h: The closing & awards ceremony is being held in the "Millennium Tower". Many media representatives cover this very special moment. TV is again broadcasting "live".

Pilots, crews and officials gather to celebrate the new European Champion. All pilots are called and are congratulated for their splendid achievements. Pilots placed 4 to 10 remain standing around the top three finishers. National anthems are played for the Bronze medal winner Marcus PIEPER (GER), Uwe SCHNEIDER (GER) and then finally for Francois MESSINES (FRA). While pilots stand on the podium the flags are raised and the audience stands up in respect for the winners. Theses three pilots congratulate each other in a special way by taking Champagne showers.

The ceremony closes by handing over the flag of the International Ballooning Commission to the delegate of the Republic Francaise, Martine Besnainou, who will be the host for the 2009 European Championship.

Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland! Bienvenu à France!

12:00 h: No protest had to be dealt with, so the preliminary results now have the status "final results". Awards ceremony confirmed for today 15:00 in "Millennium Tower"

05:00 h: Preliminary results including all tasks (1-20) had just been published on the web. Now, timings for complaints and potential protest issues will soon start, before the result is officially final.

04:00 h: While at 0300 when the event director met his team and meteo-man for discussion, the weather looked ok for a short flight, this now looks worse: rain is going to return quicker than we thought. Flight was cancelled via SMS-alarm system.

18:55 Event management kept on monitoring the situation together with the meteo-man. Unfortunately, the rain returned and closed tonight's flying opportunity. The competition director cancelled the task just prior to 19:00. Next briefing scheduled for 05:00 local times.

17:00 The forecast looks for a potential flying-slot. The competion director calls for a Fly-In and a Judge declared goal. Pilots in lead are ready to defeat their position, whereas the runners-up are keen to reduce the distance to get to the top. We all know, that the final decision is approaching. The weather situation is comlicated. The depression associated with rainfalls has moved to the West and should now allow for a flight-slot. The final launch clearance was to be given by SMS prior to 19:00 local time.

09:00 The rain, as forcest has arrived. Pilots enjoy their first relaxed breakfast at "normal times", i.e. later than 0400 local time :-) The event management team is heavily woirking on scoring and sorting out issues with the previous tasks.

05:00 Because of a clear weather forecast which left no place for debate, the briefing for 05:00 was already cancelled on monday night.

Today we saw 2 very interesting flights. This morning, the pilots flew "through" the map from SW to NE. Task 1 was spectacularily located next to the river Elbe. Balloons were dancing around the target while pilots tried to make use of some very challenging wind patterns. Tasks 2 and 3 were a Max.Dist.Double Drop. Then the pilots flew into the airstrip of Moeckern where - again - the density of results made it a great show for officials watching from the ground. The last task required an angle, the achieved change in direction was scored. This was a very long flight. Pilots were in the air up to 3,5 hours!

This evening, all balloons took off from a lovely launch-field within Rotehorn-Park, between two arms of the river Elbe. Task 1 was a Judge Declared goal in the Elbauenpark, task 2 was a maximum distance. After taking off, balloons quickly rose to more than 1.000 m and after a fairly short period of time, teams fell out of the sky for finetuning their heading on their approach to the first target. The same strategy had to be applied for the second task in that flight. The huge vertical distances made it a very visible flight from almost every place within the city of Magdeburg. The flight finished close to Moeckern in a very nice and bright sunset, but in the East the impressive cloud pattern was already a clear indication of a very significant weather change.

At 21:00 hours, the competition director made use of our SMS alarming system and cancelled the briefing for 05:00 because of approaching serious rain. In fact, he recommended to safeguard the trailers, as rainfall of up to 100 liters per m² is possible.

Last action of the day, was the publication of the provisional results. Place 1 is now taken by the French pilot Francois Messines. He is about 300 points ahead of runner-up Uwe Schneider, the defending champion. Avi Slavko Sorn from Slovenia is following just behind on place number 3. Results are so close together, that we are reluctant to state anything about the potential winner.

This concludes a very tough day. Pilots were in the air for more than 5 hours, and they did 6 tasks in total. Good night!