Breakdancing Will Make History at the Olympics—but It's Always Been Here (2024)

Victor Montalvo was 17 when he headed off to his first international battle. The competition was at one of the largest hip-hop dance festivals in the world, the Notorious IBE in the Netherlands. Victor didn’t even have a passport. The longest flight he’d ever taken from Florida was to Illinois. But by that point, breaking—or as it’s better known, by its popular misnomer, breakdancing—had already become his life.

Victor, now 30, who competes as B-Boy Victor, inherited his love for the dance from his father, Victor Sr., a B-boy who formed a crew with his twin brother, Hector, in Mexico in the 1980s. Growing up, Victor Jr. always understood breaking as a family affair, with his three siblings and cousins taking turns on the cardboard. (Now and then, his dad will still “bust out a couple moves, like,‘Yo, let me get the cardboard. Where’s the cardboard? Put it on the floor.’ And then he sets himself up to hit the backspin,” Victor Jr. says. “That’s all he can do anymore.”) But during the noughties in Victor Jr.’s hometown of Kissimmee, Florida, breaking wasn’t more than a niche interest. “None of my classmates ever took it seriously,” he recalls. “I was just like ‘the dancer kid.’”

Undeterred, Victor took his skills outside of his home. He quickly rose through the ranks as a prodigious teen breaker, bolstered by his dad, who went to extraordinary lengths to get him to that battle in the Netherlands. The event ended up being transformative for Victor, who used the trip to steep himself in the culture that gave rise to breaking. He developed a reverence for the B-boys of the ’80s and ’90s, encouraged by the mastery of Alien Ness, Rock Steady Crew, and Flipside Kings. “The rest of my family, they were like, ‘No, he’s not going. He’s staying home. He has to go to school.’ My dad’s like, ‘No, f*ck that, he’s going. I want him to go,’” Victor Jr. recalls. “That’s one of the main reasons I got to the level I got, because of all the resources that he gave me. He didn’t have much, but he still gave me what he could.”

This summer, B-Boy Victor is among a rarefied group of 32 dancers who are set to bring breaking, which emerged out of New York’s nascent hip-hop community in the ’70s, to its biggest stage yet. He, along with Sunny Choi, a.k.a. B-Girl Sunny, 35, will represent the U.S. at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, where, for the first time, breaking will be part of the program, with dancers from countries including Morocco and Lithuania set to compete. Alongside surfing, skateboarding, and sport climbing, it’s one of several new sports provisionally added to the Games this summer, and its inclusion on the Olympic slate has the potential to vault it to a level of mainstream prominence that many of the participating athletes have not seen in their lifetimes.

“This dance came from the streets,” Victor says. “But what I want is the culture to thrive. If it wasn’t for the OGs, the people who created this dance, we wouldn’t be here.”

WHEN IT COMES to hip-hop, all roads lead back to 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. The 102-unit apartment building at the western edge of the Bronx entered the historical record on August 11, 1973, when, at a party held in the building’s recreation room, DJ Kool Herc toggled back and forth between two identical funk records on a pair of turntables, isolating the percussion to produce an elongated and hypnotic drum rhythm, dubbed the “breakbeat.”

The breakbeat would form the musical bedrock of hip-hop. But if MCing and DJing represented the primary sonic expressions of the genre, then breaking embodied its physical side. In those early days, breaking’s pioneers ruled dance floors and sidewalks with their sweeping acrobatic maneuvers and gravity-defying moves like the headspin and windmill. These early devotees would henceforth be known as B-boys and B-girls, or breakers.

As the name suggests, breaking takes place during the breakbeat, with the dancers contorting their bodies into shapes and making movements that correspond with the rhythm of the music. It was, in its infancy, an underground subculture, an alternative to the era’s mainstream embrace of disco and funk. Its Black and Brown founders drew inspiration from an array of sources, from Bruce Lee’s blockbuster kung fu movies to capoeira, the complex Afro-Brazilian martial art.

The period that gave birth to hip-hop was also one shaped by turbulence. These were the years that followed the denouement of the Civil Rights movement, punctuated by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The nation was mired in a financial crisis, with inflation surging into the double digits and two recessions occurring within the span of a decade. History tells us that violence often becomes the language of people pushed to the point of desperation, and New York, in particular, became a metaphor for the strife that was roiling the country. By the end of the 1970s, the city’s northernmost borough, the Bronx, became a flash point for that economic and social upheaval, as landlords notoriously set fire to their own properties to cash in on insurance. An estimated 80 percent of housing in the South Bronx was lost, with some 250,000 people displaced.

Above all, breaking was a creative catharsis for a younger generation searching for a way to rise above their circ*mstances. “It was like a renaissance, a reawakening of a people that had been left with nothing,” says the legendary B-boy Kwikstep, a.k.a. Gabriel Dionisio, who grew up in New York amid hip-hop’s genesis. “Out of that nothing, we made something beautiful that rocked the world.”

In the ensuing five decades, breaking has undergone several deaths and resurrections. The ’80s marked the pop-cultural peak of breaking in the U.S., capturing the public’s imagination in movies such as Flashdance (1983) and Beat Street (1984). While its grip on America eventually loosened, breaking took root in other places around the world, including South Korea, South Africa, and France. What started as intense dance battles at sweaty rec-room parties became international competitions sponsored by corporate entities like Red Bull.

For B-Girl Sunny, the responsibility of representing breaking at the Olympics as a member of Team USA is something she’s still learning to grapple with. “I don’t look the part,” says the Kentucky-raised Korean American dancer, who qualified for Paris after winning gold at the 2023 Pan American Games. “While the breaking community has always welcomed me with open arms, that doesn’t mean that I’m not moving forward trying to be mindful of where breaking came from.”

A lifelong gymnast, Sunny first encountered breaking as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, shortly after a career-ending knee injury that required multiple rounds of surgery and rehabilitation dashed her competitive-gymnastics dreams. “I was kind of just lost and looking for something to do,” she says. “It was the physical piece that hooked me initially. I think I just missed being upside down.”

After graduating with a degree in marketing, Sunny continued to break and battle as she ascended the corporate ladder, eventually becoming a creative-operations executive at Estée Lauder. “The job was really just to fund my breaking,” she says. She toyed with the idea of quitting to pursue breaking full time, but as the child of two Korean immigrants with PhDs (her father in polymer engineering, her mother in math), she felt especially compelled to succeed in a more traditional field. “Obviously, if anyone were to tell their parents, ‘I’m going to quit my really great job at a huge corporation and breakdance,’ they’re probably going to freak out,” she says.

Sunny did her best to juggle her work and her passion until, finally, something cracked. “I was sitting in the car on the way to practice one day, and I was just bawling my eyes out,” she says. “The day I realized that it was my own fear of failure that was stopping me from actually doing what I had always dreamed of was the day I realized I needed to do it.” Now, she even has the full support of her parents: “Representing your country at the Olympics is not a bad marker of success.”

It takes thick skin to make it in the world of breaking—and even thicker skin to do it as a woman. Pioneering B-girl Ana “Rokafella” Garcia remembers being the “only woman dancing on the street” when she got her start in New York in the early 1990s. “I was constantly trying to shift people’s perspectives and their idea of what women can accomplish,” Rokafella says. Today, there may be more high-profile B-girls in the breaking community, but the long-term prospects for female dancers are still relatively limited. “For all the B-girls that show up to practice, they don’t stay years and years in. We’re very far and few between, especially in New York ... because growing up in the hood, it’s treacherous.”

In 1996, Rokafella and Kwikstep, who are married, established Full Circle Productions, a nonprofit mentoring young breakers. In doing so, they sought to create an environment that preserved the essence of hip-hop while also tapping into the communal creative current that gave rise to it in the first place. However, Rokafella says, there’s still a growing disconnect between today’s breakers and their elders. “They don’t know that they’re part of a bigger thing and that this is access to their inner joy,” she explains. “For us to expose them to this kind of joy is radical.”

Breaking first landed on the International Olympic Committee’s radar nearly a decade ago. At the time, the World DanceSportFederation, which for years had campaigned for ballroom dancing to be a part of the Olympic program, started to do the same for breaking. But the WDSF’s leadership of that effort proved controversial because there were no breakers on the organization’s executive committee. This spurred concerns that the artistry and integrity of breaking might in some way be compromised by its acceptance by the IOC as an Olympic sport. The idea of using a point system to judge the dancers also seemed to run counter to the spirit of breaking. (Olympic judges will award points based on six criteria: creativity, personality, technique, variety, performativity, and musicality.)

“When corporate people get involved, what they’re interested inis the money you can make, not the people who can move,” Kwikstep says. “To them, this is commercial viability for a new audience.”

Despite a successful test-drive at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires and its highly anticipated debut in Paris, breaking has been scrapped from the 2028 Games in Los Angeles in favor of other new additions, like cricket, lacrosse, and flag football. It’s another reminder that breaking’s future lies in the hands of the people who champion it outside of institutional spaces. “What’s really popping is what’s happening on the block,” Kwikstep says.

Ahead of the opening ceremony in Paris on July 26, Victor and Sunny are feeling optimistic. Victor envisions the exposure leading to more sponsorship opportunities for breakers, while Sunny aspires to open a dance center in New York “as a way,” she says, “to connect this all back to the community.”

But will the legacy B-boys and B-girls tune in? “I will be watching,” says Rokafella. “I’ll probably organize a watch party here in New York City. We’ll watch and we’ll root and we’ll dance and we’ll celebrate,” she says. “Then, after it’s over, we’ll go back to our regular programming.”

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2024 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

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