Kyra Poh may be small, but she flies through the air with the force of a typhoon. Wearing a skintight suit and visored helmet, she performs elaborate routines while suspended in a futuristic-looking perspex tunnel, riding winds topping 240 kilometres per hour (150mph). The Singaporean teenager is one of the world’s leading figures in indoor skydiving, a niche sport that blends elements of disciplines such as dance, diving, acrobatics and figure skating to jaw-dropping effect. Kyra swoops, pirouettes, flips, turns and dives in the narrow chamber, her body a blur as she is carried by air pulled upwards by giant turbines in the ceiling. The 17-year-old athlete has been training and competing since she was eight and is not only one of the youngest competitors in her sport, but one of only a few females when she began flying in 2010. The teen fell into the sport by accident, after her mother Carolyn Teo’s advertising agency was hired to create adverts for the opening of the local indoor skydiving venue, iFly Singapore. A 10-minute taster led to Kyra being invited to fly during the tunnel’s opening ceremony “on my belly doing basic stuff” with a partner. Her interest snowballed from then on, and by 2012 she was competing regularly. “Once I knew about this sport, I realised immediately it was what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young so that I could be able to fly, but I don’t think I quite knew all the hardships astronauts face, and how long they have to train.” Nearly a decade on, and she is one of her sport’s most decorated and celebrated competitors, having brought home wins at skydiving’s biggest events, including the Wind Games and the Indoor Skydiving World Cup. Her first big achievement came when she was 14 and won the junior freestyle category at the Indoor Skydiving World Cup in Poland. She also holds the record for the highest number of backwards somersaults in a wind tunnel: 68. Last year, she helped launch the largest tunnel in the world in Abu Dhabi alongside Felix Baumgartner , the Austrian daredevil known for his record-breaking leap from the edge of space in 2012. Although still at school, Kyra is one of only two indoor skydivers to have earned sponsorship from Red Bull, the soft drinks brand that has attached itself to a number of extreme sports and stunt disciplines , including base-jumping, snowboarding, wingsuit flying and chess. She has dominated the junior categories of her sport for years and, despite still being eligible to compete with other youngsters, is now allowed to compete with adults, if she chooses – a challenge she is ready to take on. Skydiving begins Asian offensive in push for 2024 Olympic inclusion “Winning is not the most important thing: in every competition we learn how to improve. So if I’m in the junior category, I feel that it would be easy for me to win, but I wouldn’t learn anything, so that’s why I’m competing in the adults category,” Kyra says. Her dream is to represent Singapore in indoor skydiving at the Olympics – as soon as the 2024 Games in Paris, if all goes to plan: in January 2018, the French Parachute Federation announced it would push to get the sport to Paris, according to the International Bodyflight Association. Kyra’s instinct for adrenaline doesn’t end with tunnel-based dives: on her 12th birthday, she took part in her first outdoor tandem skydive; by 16, she was jumping out of planes herself, and last year she completed accelerated free fall (AFF) training in Norway, involving coursework, using a parachute, and in-air exercises when leaping from 12,500 feet (3,800 metres). “I do get very nervous jumping out of a plane but the flying part is OK: once we jump out of the plane, I can do the normal tricks and everything,” she says. “It’s super fun because you have no walls so you can’t hit anything, and you can just go crazy and do moves like spins. I think what scares me is when I actually have to land.” When trying for her A-licence certification – like a driving test for skydivers – she had her first taste of the risks involved with free fall. “I fractured a rib on one of the landings,” she says. “I hit my foot on a fence and just collapsed on the floor.” Would you try packrafting along a 38 metre high aqueduct in a 2kg boat? The incident didn’t deter her, though: she hopes to return this year to fully qualify as an 18-year-old. The first person to fly in a vertical wind tunnel is believed to have been American Jack Tiffany – in 1964, when he was testing parachute technology for the Apollo space programme at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the American state of Ohio. It wasn’t until 1978 that wind tunnels were used for recreation, when inventor Jean St-Germain built an “aerodium” so his children could experience free fall without the dangers involved with skydiving. By 1999, the first commercial tunnel had been built, offering experience days to the adventurous. Since then, indoor skydiving, or bodyflight, has evolved as an extreme sport, with hundreds of professional flyers competing in a series of annual competitions worldwide. On the ground when you push for a split, the weight of your body pushes your legs down, but that doesn’t work in a wind tunnel. And you have to be able to do an ‘over split’ to be able to do a normal split Kyra Poh Without a grounding in gymnastics or dance, Kyra has had to train her body to be flexible enough to pull off complex routines in mid-air. “On the ground when you push for a split, the weight of your body pushes your legs down, but that doesn’t work in a wind tunnel. And you have to be able to do an ‘over split’ to be able to do a normal split,” she explains. Her signature move is the “upside-down scorpion”, a back-bending move she incorporates into freestyle routines that involves clutching one foot above her head while the other leg is outstretched. There are multiple competition styles within indoor skydiving, but the main ones are freestyle, involving a choreographed artistic routine designed to wow a crowd; formation skydiving, where teams of up to five people complete specific sequences together in the tunnel; vertical formation skydiving, where teams complete routines while their bodies are positioned vertically in the tunnel; and dynamic, where fliers complete a routine as quickly as possible (speed), or perform a creative freestyle routine. “To do well in freestyle, you have to come up with a lot of original moves so that people see you always advancing and pushing the sport to its limit,” Kyra says. “First, I look for inspiration from other sports, like ice skating, or dancing or gymnastics, or even pole dancing. “I’ll see what I can bring into the tunnel, but I would change the orientation because you can do anything in the tunnel. After working out all the different moves, I film it and choose a song … It’s a lot of trial and error trying to get the routine.” During competition season, Kyra spends up to five hours at her local tunnel every night after school. However, indoor skydiving is so taxing on the body that she can spend a maximum of 18 minutes in the chamber before needing a 30-minute break. When not flying, she focuses on strength training and stretching to stay in peak form. Outside skydiving, Kyra has a talent and passion for art, and proudly shows off her paintings over video call. One image that stands out is her portrait of her grandfather, her biggest supporter, who died due to cancer in 2017 – but not before he witnessed his granddaughter crowned “world’s fastest flier” that year at the Wind Games in Spain, where she took gold for the solo speed category and the freestyle category. “He watched her all the way until he passed away,” her mother, Teo, says. Kyra says: “It will be a moment that I will remember forever because for me at that time, I didn’t know that it would be the last competition he was able to watch. And when we came back, there was a newspaper article – not about how I won, but about how my grandfather inspired me.” As Kyra climbs higher in her career, supporting her dreams is a whole-family affair: Teo gave up her career to travel with her daughter, who was away from Singapore for 170 days last year. Meanwhile, her younger sister Vera is following in her footsteps, training and competing as an indoor skydiver herself. Forget yoga: here’s why scuba diving will yield mindfulness Despite the associations with pushy parenting conjured by the word “momager” – which Kyra uses to describe her mother – Teo takes care to instil a sense of humility in her daughter and support her when she wins and when she loses. “The one thing I remind Kyra about is that there’s no point just being a champion in terms of winning. What’s important is being [the] people’s champion.” Kyra adds: “I think this sport really taught me a lot … it forced me to grow up so fast because you can’t cry [after a loss]: even if we lose we know the first thing to do is congratulate the other people and make them feel proud of what they did.”