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.
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