By: Zoe Chen
Breakdancing, or breaking, will make its first public appearance as an Olympic sport in August. The competition will take place at the largest public square in Paris, France. The tickets for it are completely sold out. But when breakdancer Sunny Choi tells people she’ll be competing at the Olympics, they just laugh.
Reporter Sean Gregory detailed in TIME for Kids, “It can be hard to convince people that breaking, or breakdancing, deserves to be an Olympic sport. “I just have to hope that you see it one day,” Choi tells TIME at a coffee shop in Queens, New York. That’s where she’s lived and danced for more than a decade.”
Breakdancing is judged exactly like gymnastics and figure skating, and no one makes a fuss about how those aren’t sports. And since breakers battle one-on-one, there’s no point system. Whoever does better goes on to the next round.
Choi states that there is no doubt in her mind that breakdancing is a sport. In fact she thinks it is dance, art, and sport all together.
Sunny Choi’s first name is actually Sun, but her parents nicknamed her Sunny, and she kept it as her B-girl stage name.
Choi’s parents moved from South Korea to the United States. They raised their kids to be hard workers, and Sunny became a competitive gymnast. Her brother Jin remembers her doing cartwheels in diapers.
One night, when she was in her freshman year of college, she saw members of a breaking club breaking on a campus walkway, and they persuaded her to come to a class. Choi’s gymnastics background gave her a head start. After graduating from business school at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, she became a cosmetics executive. But she still kept breaking and even went to international competitions.
Breaking was added as a sport to the Paris Olympics program in 2020. When Choi attended a camp for the top U.S. breakers, the coach asked aspiring Olympians to raise their hands. Everyone’s hands went up except Choi’s. As a full-time executive, training for the Olympic team seemed impossible. She says that it was a really hard decision for her.
After she finished second at the World Games in July 2022, she left her job and qualified for Paris by winning the Pan American Games in 2023. She had front-flipped, shuffled her feet, and then spun to the ground. She then flashed a peace sign at her opponent, B-girl Luma from Colombia, as if she was saying, “This is mine.” And she was right.
She also says she feels happier and lighter and has more energy for things she wants to do.
Thirty-two breakers, 16 B-boys and 16 B-girls, will participate in Paris. Sunny is seen as a top contender. “She’s got the high-scale aerial power moves,” says Mary Fogarty, an associate professor of dance at York University in Toronto, Canada. “Sunny is someone who has enough material to go all the way through.”
However, Choi struggles with self-doubt. Before the Olympics, she’ll meet with a sports psychologist to work on her mindset.