Breaking down breaking’s journey to the Olympic Games: Racing Toward Paris

This is the fourth installment in our weeklong series taking a closer look at Team USA members and their sports as the Paris Olympics get underway.

For the first time, breaking, also known as breakdancing, will be competed at the Summer Games. Sixteen B-Boys and 16 B-Girls will battle for supremacy in the only new sport at the Paris Olympics.

If people have any doubts about breaking being a sport, USA Breakin’s Ricardo Fernandez Jr. told Straight Arrow News there’s no reason to question. Fernandez is credited with creating the blueprint for competitive breaking competitions and talk all about its rich history dating back to its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s.

“We were breaking to the break of the record, so now you see where the name comes from, the record has a break and that break is the percussion drum part that was elongated by the DJ,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez said breaking comes down to discipline and athleticism.

“You take the athleticism and you put two individuals or a group to compete against each other constantly, you are already creating the atmosphere for it to become marketable,” he said. “Breaking, you have to be athletic to achieve what you see now.”

Team USA will be represented by four athletes called breakers : Jeffrey "B-Boy Jeffro" Louis, who wrote a letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to get breaking to be part of the games just a few years ago;  Logan Edra, who started breaking at age 7, was given the nickname “Logistix” by her father; Sunny Choi, who picked up the sport while a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania; and Victor Montalvo, the first American to qualify, whose father and uncle were breaking pioneers.

Fernandez, known in the breaking world as B-boy Speedy Legs, has seen the sport evolve from his days of teaching it to kids in 1980s Miami to showing off his power moves in New York in the 1990s.

“I dedicated my life to breaking, in every aspect, in the art form, in the athleticism, in the competitiveness and also helped create the platform that would take it to the Olympics,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez started the B-Boy Masters Pro-Am, one of the first breaking competitions, as he tried to grow the sport and everything that comes. That includes the moves like top rock, the music from the DJ and the overall hip-hop culture that inspires the art form.

“I put together the first elements of how to judge it cause it was really hard to judge breaking," Fernandez said. "If I talked to some of the guys with whom I was down with in the beginning, I know that they thought I was probably corny about implementing something like that."

Fernandez created a 5-element judging system, one he said is very similar to how the breakers will be judged at the Olympics. In Paris, breakers will be judged on musicality, vocabulary, originality, technique and execution.

Though Fernandez said some heated politics between organizations emerged during breaking’s path to the Olympics, he knows his sport’s place on the world’s biggest stage will help it grow even more.

“I believe when it gets exposure in the next two to three weeks, it’s going to be phenomenal,” Fernandez said. “I believe it’s going to create more opportunities not only for the first four athletes from the United States to make history, but also to create new outlets for the youth.”

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