New to Olympics, breaking walks fine line between its roots and the mainstream
Whatever the International Olympic Committee’s motivations, Sunny Choi and Jeffrey Louis appreciate the platform.
“To me, it’s an opportunity that we wouldn’t have had otherwise, to share what we do with the world,” Choi said recently. “I can speculate. And it wasn’t money, because breakers don’t have a lot of that. But I’m very grateful.”
Choi and Louis; aka, “B-Girl Sunny” and “B-Boy Jeffro,” are two members of the United States’ four-person inaugural breaking team, a competition making its Olympic debut this week at the Paris Games. And the hope for those who have pushed for breaking to be included in the Olympics is that its appearance this week makes a lasting impression. It will not be on the menu for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, though there is hope breaking can return for the 2032 Summer Games in Brisbane, Australia.
Both the men’s and women’s fields in Paris are pretty open.
U.S. breaker Victor Montalvo, aka B-Boy Victor, is one of the favorites to win gold on the men’s side, along with Canada’s Philip Kim (“B-Boy Phil Wizard”), the Netherlands’ Lee-Lou Demierre (“B-Boy Lou”), Japan’s Shigeyuki Nakarai (“B-Boy Shigekix”), Kazakhstan’s Amir Zakirov (“B-Boy Amir”) and South Korea’s Kim Hong-Yul (“B-Boy Hongten”).
On the women’s side, Japan’s Ami Yuasa (“B-Girl Ami”), China’s Liu Qingyi (“B-Girl 671”), Lithuania’s Dominika Banevič (“B-Girl Nicka”), Japan’s 41-year-old Ayumi Fukushima (“B-Girl Ayumi,”) and the United States’ Logan Elanna Edra (“B-Girl Logistx”) are among the favorites.
But breaking — like skateboarding, which made its Olympic introduction at the 2020 Games in Tokyo — has multiple constituencies, many in conflict with one another. The very idea of breaking being in the Olympics bothers more than a few people in the community, who decry what they fear is the homogenization of the art — that you can’t put a score on someone’s free expression and movement of their bodies.
They worry that bringing breaking to Paris will further commercialize it, and whitewash it of its history and roots, the way many believe hip-hop and rap had their overarching messages rubbed clean once they became the dominant sales vehicles of modern popular music.
Also, the notion of cultural appropriation of a genre invented by young Black and Latino men and women by others always simmers beneath the surface, taking away the history of both breaking and hip-hop — which intersected when DJ Kool Herc, a dancer himself, who’d lamented not hearing the beats of songs he’d liked to dance to, featured the instrumental breaks of songs on his turntables, rather than the song lyrics.
Sunny Choi (B-Girl Sunny) performs at the 2023 breaking world championships. She calls the Olympics an opportunity “to share what we do with the world.” (Pier Marco Tacca / Getty Images)
Even the history of the term “breaking” itself is disputed.
The common belief among many is that it derived from the instrumental breaks that Herc and other DJs began emphasizing when playing records, and that those who danced especially well during the breaks became known as “break boys” and “break girls,” or “b-boys” and “b-girls.” But former breaker and historian Serouj “Midus” Aprahamian argues in his book “The Birth of Breaking: Hip Hop History from the Floor Up,” that the term “breaking” actually originated well before the dance form as it is now known emerged, as neighborhood slang referring to someone acting angrily or abnormally, someone at their breaking point — or, if you will, someone ready and willing to “break” the mold of existing dance.
The music, Aprahamian argues, became known as “breakin’ beats” and similar because the dancers were breaking to it, not the other way around, incorporating individual movements that made dancing with a partner on the floor impossible.
“What’s more,” Aprahamian writes, “such neglect has muddled the deeper cultural connections the term draws attention to. As has been seen historically from ‘hoofing’ and ‘swinging’ to ‘popping’ and ‘krumping,’ breaking was simply the latest African American vernacular term applied to dynamic forms of movement.”
So there is a never-ending dialogue between the haves and don’t-want-to-haves, who each claim a piece of the art.
“We’re always transparent with the community, making sure they’re in the know,” said Tyquan Hodac, a legendary breaker who is now the communications director for USA Dance, and a director of Breaking for Gold USA. Hodac is also the international president of MZK Worldwide; MZK is an acronym for Mighty Zulu Kingz, a breaking group that dates back to the Mighty Zulu Kings, credited with being the first official B-Boy breaking crew, in 1973.
“A lot of times, with hip-hop, it’s just more of, ‘Who’s these outside entity people?’” Hodac said. “‘Breaking is from the ‘hood, from the street, from our community. Who are they to come in?’ It takes those uncomfortable conversations to influence, with proper truth in there, with facts. Because a lot of time, they take information, and they’re misinformed, and they spread that misinformation to someone. … The hardest part was trying to unite the community, to help them understand, trust in us to do the right job. And they did.”
Modern breaking is a global phenomenon. An estimated 30 million people worldwide participate at some level. That includes an estimated 1 million people in France, which would make it second only to the United States in breaking population.
The host nation for an Olympic Games is allowed to lobby for up to four sports that either aren’t permanent on the Olympic docket, or have only been demonstration sports previously. France chose breaking, skateboarding, surfing and climbing.
Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, said when announcing France’s backing of breaking in 2019 that the host nation wanted to offer an Olympics “that would have an impact and the element of surprise. … This is why we have chosen to present the IOC with four sports that are as creative as spectacular, geared towards youth and completely in line with our vision.”
The 29-year-old Louis, while aware of breaking’s history, is trying to navigate ways to expand it for modern-day athletes who’d like to make a living doing it. He’s created a fitness program using some of the movements of breaking into exercises anyone can do.
“One of the reasons why I did it is just opportunity,” Louis said. “Breakers, we get into this mindframe of, once I get in my 30s, let’s say, you can have a dance studio. That’s one way to still use breaking. Have a dance studio, or be a background dancer. Those are the only two options; there’s nothing else. But I’m trying to advocate breaking as, no, there’s a lot you can do with breaking. These aren’t the only two avenues.”
The elements of the competition as a sport have been developed over the last decade, as advocates pushed the IOC to include it in the Games. For the uninitiated, breaking (no one that has anything to do with it calls it “breakdancing”) is a competition between two contestants who try to outdo one another in an improvised routine “battle” synched to music selected by a DJ. The breakers don’t know what music the DJ is going to use for the battles, so they have to work out what routines they’re going to do on the fly. And the best breakers utilize a flurry of footwork, agility and stamina to leap, pop, spin on their backs — or freeze in position on the floor.
Breakers are scored on a comparative system by judges, who are almost always former, or at least, older, breakers themselves. There are technical skills on which breakers are judged: vocabulary, technique, execution, originality and musicality. The cleaner the routine — no slips, staying in rhythm with the DJ, not hogging the stage from the other breaker — the better the score from the judges on their “faders,” which picks a winner for each battle. A competition usually lasts a few minutes, with each breaker getting three solos in the back-and-forth battle.
“In breaking, there’s no, like, zero to 10 — there’s no perfect score, because it’s freestyle, and everybody can do things differently,” Choi said. “And so that fader actually makes it more fair. But I think, unlike other sports, that actually makes it very different.”
Or, as Louis puts it, “It’s art. You’re judging art. And it’s transformed into a sport.”
Getting breaking to Paris was a heavy lift, between a section of the breaking community that wanted to branch it beyond its roots, and IOC veterans who had to shepherd the group through the IOC’s Byzantine structure and requirements that would be needed to pass muster.
Nascent breaking leagues formed over recent years that brought breakers together from around the world for competitions. One of those leagues was created by a private equity executive named Steve Graham, who’d started breaking in the late ’80s while working at Goldman Sachs, and who became known as “B-Boy Silverback” as he kept breaking well into his 50s.
Slowly, structure came to the sport.
A Washington, D.C. attorney, Ellen Zavian, the first woman attorney/agent to represent NFL players, and whose son was a breaker in local competitions, helped create the United Breakin’ Association. After the IOC came out with its Olympic Agenda 2020, developing requirements that sports not yet approved for future Games would have to meet to be considered, Zavian went to work to get the sport up to speed.
“No. 1 (was) sustainability venues,” Zavian said. “Well, you don’t need a venue; you need a piece of cardboard. Check. ‘We don’t have room in the (Olympic) village (for breakers).’ You don’t need a lot of people; you need two people. Check. You want the demographic of a younger (crowd), because you only have 50 and older. Check. You need diversity. Check. I just started going down this list, and I was like, ‘We’re good.’”
The World DanceSport Federation, an umbrella organization for multiple different dance forms, and which had been trying to get different dance genres into Olympic competitions for decades, got on board with breaking in 2015. A former IOC member, Jean-Laurent Bourquin, became president of WDSF in 2016, and began intensive lobbying of the IOC to put breaking on its long-range calendar.
The IOC agreed to a test case, approving breaking for the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics in Argentina, with 24 breakers from five countries and a team of breakers from different National Olympic Committees (a “mixed-NOC”) comprising the inaugural contestants. The inaugural event was won by Japan’s B-Girl Ram (Ramu Kawai), and Russia’s B-Boy Bumblebee (Sergei Chernyshev). In 2019, the IOC approved breaking for the 2024 Summer Olympics. The decision was not received well universally.
Choi’s path to breaking was as circuitous as the sport’s path was to Paris.
A gymnast in high school, Choi injured her knee and was looking for something else to do during her freshman year at Penn. She ran into dancers on campus that invited her to a breaking class, and she got hooked. Even as she rose through the corporate ranks after college, ultimately becoming the director of global creative operations for Estée Lauder, she kept up with her hobby. Ultimately, she made her avocation her vocation, quitting Estée Lauder early in 2023, and walking away from a significant paycheck. There was no funding awaiting her to pursue an Olympic berth. She was the first U.S. breaker to qualify for Paris, winning the Pan American Games in Chile last November.
“I saved up so I would be good for all of 2023, at least, because we had to pay for all of our flights,” she said.
Louis, who qualified for the U.S. team at the Olympic Qualifier Series in Budapest in June after reaching the men’s final, got into breaking in Houston watching his brother dance. “I wanted to see that pure, natural movement and freedom,” he said.
The hope — at least, for the advocates of breaking in the Games — is to find a way to marry the sport’s history and uniqueness to a broader community, that may not know about the OGs and other pioneers of breaking, but who have come to love its freedom of expression and physicality.
“Commercially, breaking is insignificant and off the radar and off the map in the United States,” said Zack Slusser, the vice president of DanceSport Breaking for USA Dance.
“It’s still, metaphorically, in the YMCA basement. But in many major, kind of like financial industries and hubs in the world, breaking is something commercial — in Japan, in China, in Europe. That’s why it’s in the Paris Games. So we’re looking for some kind of vehicle, which is the Olympic platform, to change the perspective on the financial and commercial interests here in the United States, so they can see breaking as a platform worthy of sponsorship investment, to help re-invigorate the community, and obviously create a more sustainable ecosystem in this space.”
Along those lines, Choi understands the larger issues of commercialization and appropriation. But she says she and other modern breakers go to great lengths in their events to recognize those who laid the groundwork for the sport before them.
“Honestly, I can’t speak for the whole entire community, but I try to do my part by always talking about it, and bringing it up,” Choi said. “I personally want to give back to the community as well down the road. I think it’s challenging, because at the Olympics, so much is distilled out. Like, even the music is going to be music that’s friendly for broadcasts. So it’s not the hip-hop, the rap, that we’re actually listening to at practice. And, so, it is a distilled form of the art form, of the dance.
“But once you get into it, and you watch it, you’re going to go down the rabbit hole and figure things out. And I also feel like recently there’s been a surge of really bringing in the older generation and doing these events, bringing in the older community. … integrating everybody. And I think it was, not a backlash, but in reaction to breaking going to the Olympics. So I actually think that’s been really beautiful.”
(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Getty; Geoffroy van der Hasselt / AFP via Getty Images)
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