As a child, Maja Kuczynska wanted to be a bird — or a dragon. “I was really into fantasy, and I thought it was unfair that they got to fly and I couldn’t,” she said. “I dreamed about being free like that.”
Unlike most dreams about flying, Kuczynska’s came true. When she was still quite young, the Polish athlete discovered indoor skydiving, an electrifying sport whose competitors defy gravity with the help of wind tunnels. Inside these glass-sided tubes, air is propelled skyward at 80 to 185 miles an hour, allowing Kuczynska to become a hybrid: part astronaut, part B-girl, part Storm from the X-Men.
In her first-place freestyle routine at the World Indoor Skydiving Championships this spring, set to Sofi Tukker’s propulsive “Best Friend,” she carved and flip-twisted through the air with impossible grace — a balletic dragon, at home in the wind.
“The tunnel for me has become a fantasy realm,” Kuczynska, 25, said in a video interview from Warsaw. “I can go in there and just dance.”
Vertical wind tunnels recreate the sensation of free-fall experienced after jumping from a plane, with powerful fans shooting air upward at approximately the speed a human body would fall. They’re often used as a training tool for outdoor skydivers. But over the last 20 years, as commercial tunnels have become more common, indoor skydiving has developed into its own extraordinary specialty. And because the tunnels can be viewed from the ground, indoor skydiving is a spectator sport in a way that outdoor skydiving can never be.
Today, clips of elite athletes like Kuczynska; her fellow world champion Kyra Poh, 22, from Singapore; and the U.S. champion Sydney Kennett, 18, routinely go viral on TikTok and Instagram, helping a niche discipline earn mainstream popularity. (JoJo Siwa is a fan.)
Many fliers have leaned into the sport’s theatrical side, capitalizing on the tunnel’s creative possibilities. Indoor routines are now commonly set to music, lending them power and poetry. Their choreography, which can incorporate aspects of breaking and ballet, has in turn become more expressive — more like dance.
Competitive indoor skydiving is still being invented. The World Air Sports Federation only began sanctioning formal competitions in 2014, with the first world championship occurring the next year. The vocabulary of moves is ever expanding, with fliers sometimes introducing multiple new elements during a single event.
Most of these athletes began in sports like gymnastics, figure skating, swimming and skiing and have adapted bits and pieces of those for the tunnel: the graceful arcs of a skater, the midair twists of a high diver.
Without a parachute pack weighing them down, indoor fliers can spin faster than outdoor ones. Kennett, who holds the Guinness world record for the most wind tunnel box split spins in a minute, said she had trouble walking after breaking the record — the centrifugal force sent so much blood to her feet.
The “tunnel rats,” as they’re playfully called, are also magpies, hunting for movements that might shine in the air. Often those derive from dance — like head spins from breaking, which might begin at the bottom of the tube and corkscrew upward in this sport. Poh said she sometimes draws from pole dancing.
Ron Miasnikov, the artistic events chair of the federation’s International Skydiving Committee, said that in competition innovation is not just encouraged but expected. “I always tell the competitors, ‘If you want a high score, surprise me,’” Miasnikov said.
In addition to solo freestyle, artistic categories include two-way and four-way “dynamic” events, in which multiple fliers dart around each other in the air — an astonishing choreographic feat, considering that most tunnels are less than 20 feet in diameter. For now, men and women compete together in all categories. That’s primarily because the number of high-level competitors is so small; there were only 23 fliers in solo freestyle at this year’s World Indoor Skydiving Championships.
Creating a freestyle routine for a wind tunnel poses a formidable challenge. The sport is new enough that few outside it understand the dynamics of the wind and the required elements of competition, so fliers are often devising their own sequences. The roar of the air makes it nearly impossible to hear instructions or corrections in real time. Crucially, time in the tunnel can be extremely expensive — hundreds of dollars an hour — so rehearsal periods are limited.
As a result, the creative process can feel like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Poh and Volkov both said that they rely on video, filming themselves improvising in the tunnel and then splicing the clips together later, on the ground, to identify a natural flow.
Music is often the last piece, although fliers typically edit tracks — or, sometimes, commission them — to align with their choreography. “Of course you want the big cool move to happen on the beat drop,” Kennett said.
Epic, cinematic songs are natural choices, but this spring’s championships also included routines set to Whitney Houston’s “I Want to Dance With Somebody” and the Backstreet Boys’ “Backstreet’s Back.” The Spanish team is known for performing to flamenco. The French dynamic two-way team’s championship routine this year was inspired by Pushkin’s fairy tale “Ruslan and Ludmila,” and set to music from Glinka’s opera.
Like figure skaters and gymnasts, indoor skydivers can find themselves pulled in opposing directions: toward muscular, trick-oriented athleticism or fluid, musically aligned artistry. Though each freestyle routine receives a presentation score, competitions tend to give the edge to technicians, rewarding speed and power moves.
Miasnikov notes that some top fliers will knowingly sacrifice technical points to make their routines more aesthetically appealing — which she appreciates. When a competitor is simply gunning for the highest possible score, “a routine like that, I call it a washing machine,” she said. “It’s like you push everything in and spin it and just whatever comes out.”
Leonid Volkov, 36, a world champion who helped pioneer flying to music, is a vocal supporter of the artistic side of indoor skydiving. “The wind tunnel, it is a theater,” he said. “You want to create something that has a place in the human heart.”
Volkov knew little about dance until he began flying. Only then, searching for choreographic ideas, did he take up popping and the rave style Melbourne shuffle. As a competitor in the 2010s, he often began his routines by dancing for extended periods outside the tunnel — prompting the World Air Sport Federation to create a new rule restricting the length of music selections. Volkov’s student Máté Feith now begins some of his routines with (shorter) dances on the ground.
When they’re not competing, fliers have more room to play. Kuczynska, who makes abundant creative content for her millions of social media followers, said her natural tendency was to slow her flying way down, going for “floating ballerina vibes.” Poh enjoys improvising in the wind to live music, played outside the tunnel by a violinist who is also a skydiver and broadcast to Poh via special earbuds.
“There is something magical when you are connecting the two art forms together, in the moment,” Poh said.
Indoor skydiving is also helping outdoor skydiving reach new heights. Though you must be at least 18 to skydive in the United States, children can start in the tunnel at age 3. (An hour of tunnel time is the equivalent of about 60 outdoor jumps.) Some young fliers who began as indoor stars — including Kuczynska and Poh — are now taking to the open air, bringing their wealth of experience with them. If Kuczynska is successful at next year’s outdoor skydiving championship, she could become the first indoor and outdoor world champion.
Several of the fliers I spoke to said it was hard to understand indoor skydiving without experiencing it. So, on a recent Wednesday, I found myself inside a tunnel in Paramus, N.J. (Beginners are accompanied by an instructor who helps them get accustomed to the atmosphere in the tube.)
The upflow of wind had a violent, brain-scrambling intensity — like sticking your hand out the window of a moving car, except it’s your whole body. I felt my long-dormant ballet instincts kick in as I fought the force of the air, my knees locking, my feet pointing.
But the weightlessness of flight is also peaceful in the way that swimming underwater can be, and, since air is less dense than water, more liberating: The tiniest movements send you floating or spinning in any direction. One of the most elusive qualities on the ground — a sense of continuous flow, breathtaking when dancers achieve it — becomes your natural state.
Once mastered, this must be a heady superpower. It’s not hard to picture world-class tunnel fliers wowing crowds at the Olympics. (Though the French Parachuting Foundation’s bid to include indoor skydiving in the 2024 Paris Games proved unsuccessful, the sport’s athletes remain hopeful.) But you can also imagine a dancer’s dancer becoming a tunnel rat, and choosing — as John Curry did, in figure skating — to further elevate the art of the sport.
“It is like dance,” Volkov said, “because it is unlimited.”
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