Skydiving
Maja Kuczynska is a master at dancing in the air
Watch Maja Kuczyńska’s performance inside the world’s largest vertical wind tunnel in Italy.
2 min
Maja Kuczynska: Bigger than the sky
Maja Kuczynska: Bigger than the sky
Maja Kuczyńska’s first experience with skydiving, followed by her exploits in the vertical wind tunnel, date back to the tender age of 10. This was the start of her unstoppable passion for the discipline, so much so that by the age of 16 she was one of the most promising athletes in the sport. A winning mixture of talent, dedication and tenacity led her to win the title of Junior World Champion of Indoor Skydiving, and to take 4th place in the Open Freestyle category at the 2016 FAI Indoor Skydiving World Cup.
Maja’s journey has been anything but easy: it has demanded enormous investment in terms of time and also of money, in addition to truly exhausting training sessions both inside and outside the wind tunnel, to develop the arms and abdominals and improve strength and flexibility, equally essential in this discipline. In the complicated tricks Maja performs, many of which are inspired by skateboarding, every single movement can affect (and distort) the position of the body and throw the athlete off-balance.
Watch the interview below to learn more about Maja and her training methods...
3 min
Interview with Maja Kuczynska
Interview with Maja Kuczynska
Italy’s first indoor skydiving centre opened very recently, but the first simulated flight actually dates back to 1964, when military man Jack Tiffany tackled a wind tunnel installed on the Wright-Patterson airbase in Ohio. Simulators designed for public enjoyment came later, with the first opening in 1982 in Las Vegas. The discipline was nominated as an official sport three years ago, and the first Indoor Skydiving World Cup took place in November 2014 in Austin, Texas; however, a wind machine had already made a spectacular appearance during the closing ceremony of the Winter Games in Turin in 2006.