Olav Zipser (born March 12, 1966, in Simmern, West Germany) is a pioneering German professional skydiver widely known as the “Father of FreeFly.” He began skydiving in 1986 at Texel in the Netherlands through the Accelerated Freefall program and quickly started experimenting with non-traditional body-flight positions. In the early 1990s he developed and promoted freeflying, three-dimensional human flight in orientations such as head-down, sit-fly, and back-fl, helping transform it from an experimental style into an official Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) competitive discipline. Zipser founded the FreeFly Training and Instruction Program, the First School of Modern SkyFlying, the Atmosphere Dolphin FreeFly Licence Program, the Space Games competitions, and the FreeFly Astronaut Project. He was the first to use Space Balls as standardized training and testing tools. In 1995 he became the first civilian to exit an aircraft from the stratosphere (approximately 41,667 feet / 12,700 m over Russia), reaching speeds of around 750 km/h. A Sports Emmy Award winner (associated with the X-Games), multi-time national and world champion, and trainer of more than a dozen world-champion skydivers, he has logged over 25,000 skydives, flown in 25 vertical wind tunnels, and was inducted into the International Skydiving Hall of Fame in 2024. Based in Thailand in recent years, he continues teaching advanced freefly techniques and documenting the philosophy and history of the discipline he helped create.