2023 World Breaking Championships: Meet Team USA’s top breakers
B-girl Sunny and B-boy Victor top the U.S. leaderboard ahead of their first opportunity to obtain quotas to Paris 2024.
Breaking
Two quotas for breaking’s inaugural Olympic Games will be obtained this weekend at the 2023 World Breaking Championships in Leuven, Belgium from 23 - 24 September.
115 B-boys and 92 B-girls from 62 countries will face off one-on-one in stands of 2,500 spectators in hopes of securing the world title and a quota for the Paris 2024 Games.
- How to qualify for breaking at Paris 2024. The Olympics qualification system explained
- 2023 WDSF World Breaking Championship in Leuven: Preview, full schedule and how to watch action live
“The World Breaking Championship belongs in Leuven,” said Mohamed Ridouani, Mayor of Leuven.
“We have a rich breaking history and our urban scene is buzzing with young talent,” he said.
Team USA’s B-girl Sunny and B-boy Victor have been sitting near the top of the world rankings, coming in at respective No. 7 and No. 5 on the World DanceSport Federation charts.
Battles, concerts, workshops and afterparties will transform Leuven into the temporary breaking hotspot of the world as it opens its arms to people coming from all over to embrace the hip-hop festival.
Here is some insight into the journeys and dreams of Team USA’s top male and female breakers, B-girl Sunny and B-boy Victor.
B-Girl Sunny
Top ranked American female and breaking world No. 7, Sunny Choi has had one goal in mind since age six: The Olympic Games.
A student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania, Choi’s collegiate gymnastics career ended almost as quickly as it started after she tore her ACL during her freshman year.
She was a business major who hated the subject and was lost, with what she felt was no sense of purpose on the Ivy League campus in West Philadelphia. Her Olympic gymnastics dreams were officially done - or so she thought.
It was a chance train with a late-night breakdancing group that changed everything.
She saw a group of B-boys performing power moves at The Gathering, the longest-running Hip Hop event in Philly, and instantly knew it was something she wanted to be a part of.
B-girl Sunny was born.
Breaking encourages self-expression and originality, and it was something Choi was enamored with after a rigorous life of studying and training that defined her identity for so long.
Her love of the sport shows on her face every time she’s in a cypher — the circle that breakers form to dance in — with a contagious smile, round after round.
Her Olympic dreams were reborn after the success of breaking at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games confirmed the sport as part of Paris 2024. She quit her job as the director of global creative operations at a large cosmetics company in the fall of 2022 and began to pursue breaking full-time.
In 2022, she was the World Championships silver medalist and came in second once again at the 2023 WDSF Pan American Championships.
This year, she will be looking for world gold as the top B-girl and B-boy look to secure Olympic quotas for their NOCs in Leuven.
B-boy Victor
His father and uncle pioneered breaking in Mexico in the 1980s and now B-boy Victor is at the top of Team USA with one year until the sport’s Olympic debut.
Victor Montalvo is ranked No. 1 in the U.S. and No.5 in the world heading into Leuven, where he is looking to gain his first world title and obtain a Paris 2024 quota.
With an original skillset and unmatched style, the American has been sweeping his competition since breaking into the sport in 2011.
In 2022, he was the fifth-ever person to win the Red Bull BC One World Finals twice, after capturing the trophy seven years prior.
Montalvo’s father, Victor Bermudez, and his twin brother Hector wanted to be champions themselves after becoming the biggest breaking sensations of Puebla, a subtropical highland 70 miles outside of Mexico City populated primarily by factory workers.
The dream was not as realistic for the twins in the generation prior, so they moved to the United States and found work as chefs in a restaurant near Walt Disney World in Florida.
Although his own breaking career forcibly came to an end, Bermudez pursued his passion by passing it down.
“He was the only one who truly believed in me,” B-Boy Victor told The Red Bulletin.
“We thought we were the only breakers in the world…we didn’t have a computer and I didn’t have a phone until I was 18,” Montalvo said about his beginnings in breaking.
A combination of picking up his father and uncle’s old skills and MTV cassette tapes kicked Vicious Victor, his former B-boy name, into gear.
Beyond his father always telling him to follow his dreams, Montalvo didn’t see much support from the rest of his family for funding a breaking career when they were already short on rent and he was far over the allowed absences from school.
It was an alternative path from the traditional way the family had in mind, but it was only a matter of time before they started to reap the rewards.
His determination, grit and style carried him to what he still regards as his “most important win,” the 2015 Red Bull BC One World Finals.
After the victory, the second-generation B-boy paid it forward by gifting his winning belt to his father.
*B-girl Sunny and B-boy Victor will fight for their spot on top of the podium at World Championships and their first opportunity to solidify the Road to Paris. *
As National Olympic Committees have the exclusive authority for the representation of their respective countries at the Olympic Games, athletes' participation at the Paris Games depends on their NOC selecting them to represent their delegation at Paris 2024.