Class of 2011 Wharton graduate Sunny Choi will compete in the games' breakdancing competition.
Nearly two decades after first breaking it down with Freaks of the Beat, 2011 Wharton graduate Sunny Choi will get the chance to showcase her breakdancing talents on the world’s biggest stage: the Olympic Games.
Choi’s Olympic dreams started early — when she was three, to be exact. Back then, Choi was a competitive gymnast. And while the possibility of chasing the Olympics was an option on the table, a knee injury in her teenage years ultimately tabled Choi’s aspirations in the sport. Her commitment to the sport and her high school studies wasn’t for naught, though, as she earned herself admission to Penn.
In her freshman year, Choi lavished in the freedom she had gained — finally free from the stress of balancing competitive gymnastics on top of school. It was also during this time when Choi first discovered Freaks of the Beat, Penn’s premier breakdancing and hip-hop student group. There, her background in gymnastics helped her pick up the basics easily.
Before long, Choi fell in love with breakdancing, often skipping class to attend practices, jams, and workshops hosted through Philadelphia. At one point, her GPA dropped to as low as 2.50, at which point her parents threatened to pull her out of college. Despite her obvious passion for the sport, after graduating with a degree in marketing Choi joined the corporate workforce like most of her peers, working as a marketing coordinator at JacobsWyper Architects.
From there, Choi worked various jobs in marketing, eventually landing herself the position of director of global creative operations for Estée Lauder’s skin-care branch in 2021. Throughout this time, Choi had never stopped breakdancing. In fact, Choi had already earned a silver medal at the World Breaking Championship 2019.
Despite her successes competing internationally, when the International Olympic Committee first approved breaking in late 2020 as an event to be held at Paris Games in 2024, Choi didn’t even consider it a possibility for herself. Her current job in the corporate world left her with no time to actually make the commitment to feature at the Olympics.
Things ultimately changed with the 2022 World Games. Choi put out yet another stunning performance en route to a silver-medal finish. After reflecting on how miserable her corporate job made her feel and evaluating her potential in the sport, Choi quit at the tail end of 2022 to pursue breakdancing full time. And just like that, Choi was one step closer to making her Olympic dreams a reality.
At the 2023 Pan American Games — the first iteration of the event to ever feature breaking — Choi secured the gold medal, making her the first American woman to qualify for the 2024 Olympics in breaking. Entering Paris as the No. 1 ranked female breakdancer in the U.S., Choi is favored to medal at the Games.
Breaking will be making its inaugural appearance at the senior-level Olympic Games after first making an appearance at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires. Like with gymnastics, judges score the breakers based on various categories. In this case, those categories are creativity, personality, technique, variety, performativity and musicality.
In games or matches called “battles,” two athletes at a time, referred to as b-boys or b-girls, will face off against each other in round-robin fashion. Battles will be best-of-two rounds during the round-robin phase, where athletes are separated into four groups of four, and best-of-three rounds for the later one versus one knock-out phase. Each breakdancer gets 60 seconds in each round to complete their routine, with the top two athletes in each round-robin group advancing. From there the knock-out rounds begin where the athletes move on to compete for bronze, silver, and gold.
The 2024 Paris Olympics are currently set to kick off on July 26, with the opening ceremony slated for 1:30 pm EDT. Choi will take the floor at La Concorde as one of the 16 b-girls competing in the first-ever rendition of the event on August 9.
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