Kadour Ziani, known as Zianimal, is a French dunker from Saint-Dizier and one of the founding figures of professional street dunking. He is 5'11" and jumps off one foot, with a verified vertical of 140 centimetres, roughly 55 inches, measured by the World Dunk Association. In his prime the figure most often cited was 56 inches, and he has been credited with 60 off a single leg.
He co-founded SlamNation in 1997, which is generally treated as the first professional street dunk team, and he is usually described as the first person to make a living purely from dunking. Before that, dunk exhibitions existed inside halftime shows and streetball tours; SlamNation made the dunking itself the product. He estimates more than 30,000 dunks across a career now in its fourth decade.
His signature is the kick the rim, where he wedges the ball in the rim and then kicks it back out, which requires getting a foot to roughly ten feet in the air. He also holds a record for the highest kick at 9'9". The other dunk that carries his name is the double windmill, two full rotations of the arm before the finish, which he performed over rows of seated people.
The clearest measure of his influence is that the World Dunk Association's catalogue of dunk components lists the Ziani Double Windmill as a named air move. Very few dunkers have a body position in the sport's technical vocabulary named after them. His catalogue also includes 360s over two seated people, the 360 cuff, and free throw line dunks, all off one foot.
He is 52 and still active. He has written a book called Unlock Mobility: 7 Postures, built around ancestral movement positions modelled on animals, which reflects where his attention has gone as the career has lengthened: from how high a body can jump to how long it can keep working.