Breaking makes its Olympic debut this Friday in Paris. Enjoy it on sports’ biggest global stage while you can, as it’s not on the program for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The women’s final at the Paris 2024 Olympic breaking competition will broadcast on NBC at 2 p.m Eastern time on Friday. The men’s competition will be televised on Saturday at 2 p.m Eastern time.
If you’re new to breaking, here’s what you need to know about how it's scored, who to watch and where it all began.
Break dancer Grace Choi, a.k.a. B-Girl Sunny
Didn’t breaking start in New York City?
Yes. It emerged in the Bronx in 1973, around the time hip-hop was born. That’s when pioneering DJ Kool Herc emceed his sister’s dance party in an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue.
Herc would find the most danceable parts of songs and stretch them out by playing the same record on two turntables and repeating the sample – those long stretches of music turned out to be highly danceable.
I thought it was called breakdancing?
For decades, many media outlets have referred to the dance form as "breakdancing," but several practitioners interviewed for this article said they prefer the term “breaking.”
John “Flonetik” Vinuya at a cypher in a “down rock.”
Odylle 'Mantis' Beder is a veteran breaker who now performs with the crew Full Circle Souljahs and runs the Bgirl Herstory project, which documents the stories of old school and new school generations. She said the dance did not have a name in the early stages.
“Kool Herc just noticed that people who were getting down and dancing would drop to the ground when there was a break in the track,” Mantis said. “The media did not know how to call this new dance, so they heard that and started calling it ‘breakdancing’.”
Before that, people in the hip-hop scene had used terms like “going off” or the “boyoyoing” to refer to the dance.
Sunny Choi from Queens competes Friday in Paris.
OK, I’m interested. Who should I look out for?
Breakers are typically known as B-girls or B-boys.
The Olympics has separate men’s and women’s competitions featuring 16 B-girls and 16 B-boys from all over the world.
Queens resident and B-girl Sunny Choi is one of Team USA's breakers. She's a former competitive gymnast who started breaking after joining the school club during her first year at the University of Pennsylvania.
She moved to Queens in 2012, began competing around the world, and eventually won silver at the 2019 World Urban Games and at the 2022 World Games. Choi qualified for the Olympics after she won the 2023 Pan American Games title.
Despite her enormous success, many fans of the sport predict that Lithuania's Dominika “Nicka” Banevič, 17, is the gold medal favorite after she won the 2023 world title at just 16.
America’s biggest hope for an Olympic gold medal in breaking is with Florida-native Victor “B-boy Victor” Montalvo, according to some experts interviewed for this piece.
How is it scored?
Breaking consists of four kinds of movement. First is toprock, which is footwork performed by the breaker in a standing position. There's also downrock, which is when breakers dance low to the ground and are equally supported by their arms and legs. Then, there are power moves, which are more complicated acrobatic moves where the breaker is typically only supported by one body part. Finally, there are freezes, where breakers stop all movement and maintain their balance in an often difficult position.
Boos and cheers often decide the winners in the underground scene, according to B-girl Mantis. The Olympics' process is more formal, however.
Breakers will take turns battling 1 on 1 over a series of three, one-minute rounds, to music that will be played by a DJ.
According to the International Olympic Committee, nine judges will score athletes’ performances based on these five factors: technique, vocabulary, musicality, execution and originality, with the last two categories counting the most. Each round will be judged individually and the competitor who wins the most rounds wins gold.
Breakdancing is going mainstream. That’s great, right?
Yes and no. Local breakers expressed mixed feelings about the art form’s global attention.
John “Flonetik” Vinuya, who owns 360 Flow Breaking studio in Kensington, Brooklyn, with his wife B-girl Mantis, acknowledged that the sport’s ascendance into mainstream national and international competitions can be great for the upcoming B-boys and B-girl dancers “because they have a goal to reach.“
But he expressed concern that the practice might lose a little of its freewheeling creativity.
“There's always going to be a fight between whether breaking is still culture or if it’s a sport, now that you can make money off of it,” Flonetik said. “But there's still a lot of us out here that think about that cultural aspect of hip-hop, and we’re not trying to commercialize it.”
Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio is one of the city’s original breakers who started in 1981 at age 11. He founded the hip-hop collaborative Full Circle in 1992 with his now wife Ana “Rokafella” Garcia.
Kwikstep said it’s great to see the athletes bring attention to the sport, but said that as breaking goes mainstream, it loses some of its earlier elements.
He said that mainstream commercial competitions like the Red Bull BC One competition and now, the Olympics, avoid the high stakes rivalries of more traditional breakdancing.
“Those are not battles, they’re not cyphers in the way we know them,” Kwikstep said. “In a real cypher, the person you’re battling may be your actual archnemesis, there might be real animosity.”
But Kwikstep expressed dismay that breaking's popularity among Black and Latino youth in New York City was waning, even as it's gained a following in places like Japan, the Netherlands and France.
“Black and brown people, we export our culture around the world, and then wherever it was born, it becomes inaccessible to the people who created it,” he said.
“After the interest about breaking from the Olympics is gone, how do we keep our own momentum going?” he wondered.
