- Breaking is set to make its Olympic debut in Paris 2024.
- The dance form originated from Black and brown communities, emerging during the rise of hip-hop in the 1970s.
- Breaking became a hit in Korea, where bootleg VHS tapes of American breaking competitions circulated.
Sunny Choi stumbled upon breaking by accident. She'd been walking around the University of Pennsylvania campus late at night as an undergraduate student when she spotted people dancing on the smooth concrete.
It was unlike anything she'd seen before. Choi had grown up with Korean parents and lived what she described as a "very traditional" life of an immigrant child: She took AP classes, went to Wharton, and aimed to get a financially-stable job after graduating.
But there was something captivating about these dancers. The next Friday, Choi found herself at a free class taught by the school's breaking team. She'd been a gymnast her whole life but quit after a knee injury, and running on the treadmill wasn't cutting it for her.
"It was a love-hate relationship because I was super shy. I used to sit in the corner and watch everyone else dance," Choi, now 34, said. "But I knew it was something I really wanted to do."
She watched as the other B-boys and B-girls flipped, spun, and seemed to suspend in mid-air. Choi, who'd loved defying gravity as a gymnast, was hooked.
This past month, Choi was one of 250 breakers from around the world to compete in the WDSF World Breaking Championships in Leuven, Belgium. The stakes were high: Only the first-place B-Boy and B-girl would qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics, where breaking will be debuting as a sport for the first time.
"Breaking has always been so underground and not seen as very credible by the mainstream," Choi, who goes by her stage name B-Girl Sunny, told Insider. "By the Olympics adopting breaking as a new sport, it gives it a credibility and level of exposure we've never seen before."
Breaking into Korea
Breaking emerged in Black and brown communities in the Bronx during the rise of hip-hop in the early '70s. Breaking and hip-hop swiftly took hold in other countries like Korea, where bootleg VHS tapes of American breaking competitions circulated among young Koreans, stoking their interest in breaking and hip-hop culture more broadly.
In a society that traditionally disallowed certain types of individual expression, breaking became a form of freedom and self-discovery — something that persists to this day.
"I had never really artistically expressed myself before. I'd always just taken calculus and physics in college," Choi said. "Breaking turned into not just an exploration of physical movement, but of myself and who I am."
Inspired by anime
The son of Korean immigrants who'd moved to Canada, Philip Kim was blown away when he discovered breaking for the first time at 11 years old. A local crew called the Now or Never Crew performed at the Vancouver Art Museum, and the combination of athleticism and creative freedom left a mark on Kim.
"I began watching tons of breaking videos on YouTube," Kim, also known as B-Boy Phil Wizard, told Insider. "I practiced whenever I could. There were a lot of times in high school where if I had an idea that popped into my head, I'd ask the teacher if I could go to the bathroom so I could go out to the hallway to try out the move."
Kim also began to notice similarities between breaking and the anime and superhero movies he watched, not just in the exaggerated movements, but in the lifestyle, too.
In his favorite anime "One Piece," for example, characters belong to crews that amass bounties by which their notoriety is judged. Kim saw parallels with the competitive world of breaking.
"The realm I've been living in feels like an anime. I feel convinced the world I live in isn't really real, and it's all a game," Kim said.
A mental battle
While competition-winning breakers can earn thousands of dollars in prizes, breaking isn't a lucrative path for most dancers.
For around four years, Kim said he had a daily "mental battle" with himself over whether to continue pursuing competitive breaking.
"Like many immigrants, my parents had sacrificed a lot for me and my brothers, and there's a lot of internal desire to help my parents," Kim told Insider. "Every day I struggled with, 'Can I do this? Should I be doing this? Should I go back to school? Get a job?'"
Choi also felt similar pressures, juggling a demanding, full-time corporate job with breaking. Working her nine-to-five became a way to fund her passion for dance, because it was difficult for her to make a living from breaking — something she felt was even harder because she's a woman.
"It's intimidating to walk into a room where it's like, 100 guys to one female, and the dance is also very macho and people are getting up in your face," Choi said. She added that many moves were created by male breakers, which meant female breakers often have to adapt the moves to work with their bodies.
There was also a sentiment of "you're good for a girl," though Choi said it's changed as breaking has become more diverse and universally accepted.
Catapulting to the Olympics
Both Choi and Kim hope that the Olympics will further usher breaking into the mainstream, making it more financially accessible and opening up the sport to more people.
At the WDSF World Championships in September, Kim placed second among the 150 B-boys, while Choi placed 17th out of 100 B-girls. They have two more shots at qualifying for a coveted spot at the Paris Olympics: the Pan American Games in November and the Olympics Qualifier Series next spring.
Neither breaker is letting the setback deter them: Kim trains four hours a day, and Choi, who quit her corporate job earlier this year to focus fully on breaking, is balancing her physical conditioning with nurturing her mental health by seeing a therapist.
"My journey started off as a more superficial, creative thing, and then it turned into something deeper," Choi said. "I'm still figuring out how to bring more of me with me when I'm out there performing, whether on the floor or off of it."
