Japan's Ayumi: The Olympic impact on breaking
The 39-year-old b-girl and former world champion has won her second straight national title but isn't letting any of the success get to her head as breaking's Olympic qualifying race heats up this weekend in Kitakyushu, Japan.
Breaking
The Paris Olympic Games is still more than a year away. But b-girl Ayumi is already feeling its impact on breaking.
“I’m from Kyoto but I got to Tokyo and turned on the TV and breaking was everywhere,” Ayumi said after she won the All Japan Breaking Championships for the second consecutive year, televised live nationwide by public broadcaser NHK.
“I was shocked. Everyone was telling me there were breaking photos all over Tokyo Station. I was so surprised.”
Ayumi, aka Fukushima Ayumi, will be 41 when the Games rolls around in the summer of 2024. If she seems settled compared to your average breaker, well, there’s a good reason for it.
Odds are, the inaugural women’s champion of breaking in Paris will come from Japan. With Ayumi, world champion Ami and her older sister Ayu, as well as Riko and men's three-time national champion Shigekix’s sister Ayane, the country is stacked.
So to top the national championships of a country as competitive as that would qualify as grounds to be confident for Paris, perhaps even overconfident.
But Ayumi doesn’t see it that way. First things first, she needs to get to Paris before all the talk about medals and podium and what not.
“Nothing is guaranteed,” the 2021 world champion said with a stern look. “It all comes down to how I do over the course of this year. I’m not getting ahead of myself, just one step at a time.
“Kitakyushu is next. If I do well there, then on to the next one. That’s the way I look at it.
“There’s no one thing that will get me to Paris. Other than the world championships in Belgium, the rankings will decide things.
“I need to put in the work, one by one, and hopefully that will lead to Paris”.
Kitakyushu is the first stop in the Breaking for Gold World Series to be held on Friday and Saturday in the Fukuoka Prefecture city. Points accrued will count towards the rankings that determine who goes to next year’s Olympic Qualifier Series from March to June.
For many b-boys and b-girls - Ayumi being one of them - breaking the competition has been an adjustment from breaking the culture.
As excited as they are about what the Olympics can potentially do for the sport, the way it did for skateboarding for example, words like points, rankings and qualifying still have not sunk in for many in breaking.
It being an art, traditionalists argue that competitive breaking goes against the very grain of the dance form.
Ayumi admits it has taken some getting used to but she believes - hopes - that breaking will benefit from joining the Olympics in the long run, without losing its essence that dates back to the streets of New York in the 1970s.
There is an excitement around the breaking fraternity and sorority that has never been seen before.
“In the past year, I’ve figured out where I need to be physically to take part in a sporting competition and adjusted my training to be where I want to be,” Ayumi said.
“I’ve been a part of the culture for a while now but it’s only in the last two years or so that I’ve been battling as a sport. I still learn something new every time out and there have been many, many times when things didn’t go the way I expected it to.
“There is a beautiful culture about breaking. It is also a sport. I couldn’t be happier and more grateful if more people knew about it and supported. I really couldn’t.”