Grounded for a year due to injury, Singapore skydiver Kyra Poh aims to soar again

SINGAPORE – For someone who spends a large part of her life flying in the air, being grounded was an unbearable experience for Singaporean skydiver Kyra Poh.

The 22-year-old had her wings clipped for an entire year, after suffering an ankle injury in training in January 2024 which had her using a wheelchair for 2½ months.

Poh told The Straits Times: “It was definitely a very tough experience. I’ve been doing this sport for over 14 years now, and this is my biggest injury.

“I crashed my left ankle (against the wall of the wind tunnel), and shattered my talus, so I was out of training for almost a whole year.

“Everything in my life changed, I was going to school in a wheelchair, I had struggles going up the stairs and taking a shower.”

As her body healed, Poh resumed her studies at the Essec Business School and also interned at the Singapore Disability Sports Council.

When she tried to return to training in June, the pain was too much to handle and she went under the knife again in September.

She is well on the road to recovery now and is hoping to add to her 2023 title at the World Indoor Skydiving Championships in Charleroi, Belgium in April.

The three-time World Cup of Indoor Skydiving champion said: “The best thing about the tunnel is that I have no impact (on my ankle) in the tunnel because I’m flying. So it was really good for me to kind of slowly get back into it.

“Having this whole big break, every single day I wanted to go back to the tunnel, so now we’re training very intensively. I really am dying to compete, I’m gonna go 100 per cent or nothing at all.”

She is also aiming to become the first Singaporean to win both indoor and outdoor skydiving world championship titles.

Poh, who is competing only in team events in Charleroi, said: “We just finished a training camp two weeks ago. And after this competition (world championships), I’m going to start training a lot of outdoor skydiving as well, because my dream is to be able to become a world champion in the sky.”

A debut at the SEA Games on home soil in 2029 is also a dream, as she is hoping the sport will be included in the roster.

“We have a really big goal, and that’s to have indoor skydiving in Singapore in 2029, so that’s what we’re really pushing for now,” she said.

“Our sport is really growing a lot in Asia. When we first started, it was mainly dominated by Europeans and the United States. But now we have a lot of Asean countries (taking part), they’re all starting to send teams into our world cup and world championships.”

Also on her wish list is to be the first civilian to skydive over Singapore on National Day.

“It’s also another big goal of mine,” added Poh. “Because I know the Red Lions always do it every National Day Parade, and that’ll be something that I would really love to do, to perform my splits and my spins above the Singapore sky.”

From March 2 to 10, Poh will be in the Bahamas in her role as Red Bull ambassador for the Global Aerial Performance Camp, where she will skydive over the Caribbean islands.

She is also the face of Red Bull’s “Train like a Champ” challenge, which runs till March 11 for individuals of all fitness levels who aim to make physical activity a fun and consistent part of everyday life.

Participants can join the challenge via the Strava app by logging at least 12 30-minute activities over a four-week window.

The top performers will get the chance to compete at the Red Bull 400 – a 400m uphill sprint with a maximum incline of 37 degrees – in Sapporo, Japan in May.

On the challenge, Poh added: “It gets people to see the insights of what it takes to be a world champion. People only see when we finish our competition, but they don’t see the months of preparation.

“I would definitely do it (Red Bull 400). A lot of people say I have two left feet, and I can only be useful in the tunnel but I would like to prove them wrong, and I always like a challenge.”