Red Bull Flugtag is coming back to Harriet Island Regional Park in St. Paul on Sept. 7 after a nine-year hiatus.

The sport is both high-energy and completely nonmotorized — five-person teams pushing human-powered gliders off a 30-foot-high platform into the river. Without engines, most gliders fall straight down into the water, often with their teams right next to them.

In 2010, the Inver Grove Heights-based Major Trouble and the Dirty Dixies — led by 27-year-old Rachel Norman — flew their manned glider 207 feet, breaking the previous record of 195 feet before an audience of 90,000 or more spectators.

RELATED: A highlights reel from 2010 Flugtag: Watch this Woodbury woman’s triumph (and others drop like a brick)

The record has since been broken by the Chicken Whisperers, who flew 258 feet in 2013 during the Red Bull Flugtag competition in Long Beach, Calif.

To announce the return of Red Bull on Tuesday, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and professional athlete Levi LaVallee made one of the more adventurous entrances of their respective careers.

Both men jumped from an airplane 12,000 feet in the air while tied to professional skydivers.

An exhilarated Carter, who wore a full suit and tie beneath his skydiving gear, touched down in Harriet Island Regional Park, called his wife to tell her he landed safely, and then walked to a podium overlooking the river to speak to the press.

LaVallee, a professional snowmobiler who served as a celebrity judge for the flugtag competition in 2010, said 50 teams will be selected to participate, and there is no cost to apply.

The application deadline is June 26. Teams, ages 18-plus, will be judged by gliding distance, creativity and showmanship, and themed entries are almost requisite. “I’m hoping to see a Minnesota Vikings team, or a Jucy Lucy,” LaVallee said. “This event screams fun from top to bottom, or from a 30-foot platform down to the Mississippi.”

Since 1991, Red Bull has organized flugtag competitions in 162 sites across the world. This is the second time the contest will be held in St. Paul.

Carter noted that the city has worked with Red Bull for nearly a decade to coordinate extreme sporting events.

From 2012 through 2018, Red Bull hosted a leg of its Crashed Ice international extreme skating competition by the Cathedral of St. Paul.

City officials were disappointed to learn last year that the extreme sport had decided to take its downhill ice-skating discipline to Boston, Japan and Finland in 2019, but not St. Paul.

The mayor’s office soon engaged Red Bull in discussions about flugtag, which means “flying day” in German.

“Sometime last fall, we started talking about it. It made a lot of sense,” said Carter, who was hopeful St. Paul would again break the world record. “We’re bringing it back home.”