This summer, Breaking will make its Olympic debut at the 2024 Paris Games, and b-girl Sunny Choi is ready to make history. In fact, she already did! Last October, Choi became the first American woman to qualify for the Games after winning the gold medal at the Pan American Games.
Choi spent her teenage years as a gymnast with Olympic aspirations, but knee injuries forced her to quit the sport at just 18. Shortly thereafter, as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, she discovered a couple of breakers dancing on campus who invited her to take a class with them. She took them up on the offer and has been dancing ever since. “It started organically with going to practice where someone would teach me what I was observing,” she says. “Once I knew the first few basic steps, I would go and figure it out on my own after that. It was a lot of observation, experimentation and pushing myself out of my comfort zone.”
Leaving that comfort zone was initially a big challenge for Choi. “With gymnastics, I would repeat what I was taught to do over and over again until I got it perfect,” she says. “In breaking, you allow mistakes to happen and you own them. I hated that I didn’t know how to be creative under these circumstances. I used to sit in the corner and watch and not participate.” In the end, however, Choi refused to be defeated by her fears. She chose to overcome the obstacles that held her back and jump into dance with both feet. Choi’s first exposure to breaking was in 2007 and just a few years later she attended her first local competition.By 2015, her talent and confidence had grown exponentially and she was making a name for herself in international breakdancing competitions.
While developing her dancing talent, Choi began working at a corporate company and most recently served as Director of Global Creative Operations at Estée Lauder. “Dancing was a part-time hobby for me until 2023,” says Choi. “It wasn’t until this Olympic track came along that I felt like I could make a living out of it,” she says. In fact, it took Choi a long time to decide that he wanted to pursue the Olympics in the first place. “I knew I’d have to quit my job and give up everything I’d worked for to do it.” In 2021, shortly after the cut was approved for the 2024 Paris Olympics, all the dancers around Choi began talking about their aspirations to participate. “Everyone was determined to do it, but all I could think about was the sacrifices I had to make,” she says. “But as time went on, I began to realize that it was really just my fear of failure that was holding me back. I was standing in my way.” So instead of dealing with the things that would make an Olympic run difficult, Choi became determined to succeed. “It was just like those early days of break dancing, when I was standing paralyzed in the corner,” she says. . “I couldn’t do that to myself. I had to try.” In January 2024, she quit her job and began to hold down her full-time job, and by November 2023, she was officially an Olympian.
Here, she talks about her journey to the Olympics, her goals for the Games and her advice for aspiring dancers like hers.
Her Olympic training regimen “The first thing I did was find a strength and conditioning coach and a therapist who focused on sports psychology. I also developed a schedule that allowed me to balance both training and other responsibilities that I have. My training time was split 50/50 between dance and fitness, followed by hours of recovery work and yoga. I also traveled to different races each week. It was a lot.”
For the qualifications for the Olympics “There are a total of 16 men and 16 women who qualify. Five of them are winners of their respective continental games, one of them won the world championship this year and 10 will qualify through trials in May 2024.
You are ranked based on a world ranking and that number comes from a points system from the Olympic chain of events. None of these events were held in the US, one was in Canada, maybe two were held in South America, and the rest were in Europe and Asia. It was exhausting for us to travel but we had to try to get the points. I ended up earning my spot at the Pan American Games [the continental games for the Americas] but my world ranking would also earn me a place.”
About what it feels like to become an Olympian “Strangely, the initial feeling wasn’t excitement, just relief. I qualified. I did it I’m halfway there. It still feels so far away but I’m relieved I’ve got a guaranteed place and now I just have to do what I’m doing.”
Her goals for the Games: “I want to have fun and be myself. Of course it would be nice to win, but I would feel better to be both present and satisfied with the way I danced or presented myself to the world than to go home with a medal but not having enjoyed myself. ”
Her advice to other breakers with Olympic dreams: “Everyone has a different starting point, but ultimately it’s important to look at yourself and be honest. What do you want and why do you want it? Be honest about what the sacrifices are and whether you are willing to make them. Then just trust your intuition and move on. It’s scary, but that’s what makes it so much more rewarding.”