‘Floating Ballerina Vibes’: The hypnotic allure of indoor skydiving

NEW YORK – 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 dreamt 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 skywards at 129kmh to 298kmh, 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, 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 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 are often used as a training tool for outdoor skydivers. But over the past 20 years, as commercial tunnels have become more common, indoor skydiving has developed into its own extraordinary speciality. 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 American Sydney Kennett, 18, routinely go viral on TikTok and Instagram, helping a niche discipline earn mainstream popularity.

Many fliers have leaned into the sport’s theatrical side, capitalising 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 began sanctioning formal competitions only in 2014, with the first world championship taking place 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.

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 are 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’,” he said.

In addition to solo freestyle, artistic categories include two-way and four-way “dynamic” events, in which multiple fliers dart around one another 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 Leonid Volkov, 36, a world champion who helped pioneer flying to music, 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 Alexander Pushkin’s fairy tale Ruslan And Ludmila, and set to music from Mikhail Glinka’s opera.

Like figure skaters and gymnasts, indoor skydivers can find themselves pulled in opposing directions: towards 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.

Several fliers have said it was hard to understand indoor skydiving without experiencing it. So, on a recent Wednesday, I found myself inside a tunnel in Paramus, New Jersey. (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 is your whole body.

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 is not hard to picture world-class tunnel fliers wowing crowds at the Olympics (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.” NYTIMES