It seems that everyone (aside from Cary A.) immediately jumped to speculation about the pilot’s age. Yet no one commented on the fact that the competition had been “postponed because of high winds”. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps those winds were not well-behaved constant-speed straight-line winds, and that it wouldn’t take much of a burble in the breeze on a tight, low-altitude, base-to-final turn to totally destroy the lift and turn the pilot into a pax for two hundred feet. Unfortunately, I doubt he was that high on a STOL approach Every pilot here who has had that happen, and was lucky enough to survive, raise you hand. (Mountain airstrip, terrain-confined pattern, wind blew me downwind, then died on B2F turn, felt elevator soften and dove for the ground short of threshold, just cleared runway end lights, then wind resumed and I ballooned. Landing was smooth; approach was entertaining for those on the ground.)