Defying gravity with freestyle poetry in motion

As a child, Maja Kuczynska wanted to be a bird - or a dragon.

- Margaret Fuhrer

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.