49 Fun Facts About Breaking

Breaking developed in which New York City borough?

The Bronx: dancers at its early-1970s parties saved their best moves for a record's drum break, which is why DJs there began stretching those few seconds out.

Breaking was one of four sports Paris picked for its 2024 Games, with skateboarding, sport climbing and which other?

Surfing: the other three had all been tried in Tokyo, so breaking was the only brand-new sport Paris picked, and Los Angeles then left it off its own list for 2028.

Which DJ coined the terms 'b-boy' and 'b-girl' for the dancers at his parties?

DJ Kool Herc: his shout of 'B-boys go down!' sent dancers to the floor, and he has said 'breaking' was street slang for someone pushed to breaking point.

Along with footwork, power moves and freezes, what is the fourth element of breaking?

Toprock: the first b-boys danced only upright, and it was the urge to outdo a rival in battle that sent them down to the floor.

Which future Oscar winner danced as a breaker behind Lionel Richie at the closing ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics?

Cuba Gooding Jr.: he was 16 and living in the city because his father's soul group had scored a hit and moved the family west; Jerry Maguire won him his Oscar twelve years later.

Cindy Campbell threw hip-hop's founding party in 1973 to raise money for what?

School clothes: she threw it in her building's rec room, charged girls 25 cents and boys 50, and put her 18-year-old brother on the turntables.

Which Incredible Bongo Band track, later remade by the Sugarhill Gang, is often called hip-hop's national anthem?

Apache: the band was a studio pick-up group first assembled for a drive-in B-movie soundtrack, and the record made little noise until party DJs seized on its bongo break.

Which singer did many of breaking's pioneers name as 'the first b-boy'?

James Brown: breakers trace the dance to the way he moved to his 1972 hit 'Get on the Good Foot', a routine teenagers copied at home and at parties.

Films starring which martial artist are cited as an influence by early breakers?

Bruce Lee: breaking began as upright stepping, and the kicks, sweeps and spins that took it to the floor came partly from the kung fu films filling 1970s cinemas.

Which subtitle of a 1984 breaking-movie sequel became a running joke as the name for any follow-up?

Electric Boogaloo: the sequel was rushed into cinemas seven months after the original, and '2: Electric Boogaloo' has been tacked onto joke follow-up titles ever since.

Which power move does Rock Steady Crew's president say he found by accident when a backspin kept on rolling?

Windmill: he says he overshot a chair freeze and simply kept turning, and the continuous backspin opened the way to the spin-heavy power moves of the 1980s.

Rock Steady Crew's cameo in which film first showed breaking to audiences around the world?

Flashdance: the crew's cameo is one short street scene in a 1983 hit about a welder who dreams of dance school, yet it was most of the world's first sight of breaking.

Who doubled for Jennifer Beals in the breaking move of her 1983 audition scene?

Crazy Legs: the teenage b-boy spun in for one floor move, French dancer Marine Jahan did most of the rest, and a gymnast performed the slow-motion dive.

Which 1984 dance film gave rapper Ice-T his first acting role, as a club MC?

Breakin': Ice-T has since called the film and his own turn in it 'wack', though it out-earned Sixteen Candles when the two opened on the same weekend.

Street dancers Ozone and Turbo rule the boardwalk of which Los Angeles beach community in a 1984 dance film?

Venice: the film grew out of a documentary about Radio-Tron, a youth club across town, and several of that club's dancers walked straight into its cast.

Which country hosted the first international breaking competition, in the early 1990s?

Germany: Thomas Hergenröther's Battle of the Year, launched in Hanover, grew into the 'World Cup of B-Boying', and one edition became a documentary that Hollywood then remade.

Which martial art do breaking's moves so resemble that its pioneers are still asked whether they borrowed from it?

Capoeira: the Brazilian art has moves strikingly like a breaker's, yet pioneers say they never saw it until the 1990s, long after their own dance had taken shape.

Which future action star appears as an uncredited dancing spectator in a 1984 Cannon dance film?

Jean-Claude Van Damme: newly arrived from Belgium, he and a childhood friend took the job as extras, four years before Bloodsport made him a star.

Which energy drink company has run breaking's one-on-one world final, BC One, since 2004?

Red Bull: each year thousands of breakers fight through qualifiers around the world for one of 16 places in each final, and the final itself moves to a different city every time.

Which name for the dance do many of its pioneers reject as a label coined by the media?

Breakdancing: 1980s coverage used the word for New York's dance and unrelated West Coast funk styles alike, which is why purists, and the Olympics, say breaking.

Which country's b-girl won the first women's Olympic breaking gold?

Japan: its champion, Ami, followed her older sister Ayu into hip-hop dancing as a six-year-old, and the sisters became two of the world's leading b-girls.

Alongside DJing, rapping and breaking, what is the fourth original element of hip-hop culture?

Graffiti: the two grew up side by side, so a 1983 documentary made about New York's subway painters ended up capturing the city's breakers too.

Which country's breaker won the first men's Olympic breaking gold?

Canada: Phil Wizard beat the host nation's Dany Dann for gold, under a stage name he got by accident when 'Phil from the Wizards crew' was shortened.

Often lumped in with breaking, which West Coast style did Don Campbell create while trying to do the Funky Chicken?

Locking: he added a sudden lock of the joints to the steps, made it his signature, and took it to Saturday Night Live with his group, The Lockers.

Which Paris landmark hosted the Olympic breaking battles in 2024?

Place de la Concorde: the square where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined became an urban park for breaking, skateboarding, BMX and 3x3 basketball.

At the Paris Olympics, who chose each battle's music?

The DJ: nobody on the floor knew what was coming, so every round was improvised to whatever played while nine judges voted on it.

Which of these was one of the five criteria Olympic breaking judges marked?

Technique: the others were vocabulary, execution, musicality and originality, each worth a fifth, and no judge gave marks out of ten; each simply voted for one breaker a round.

Which b-girl's 'kangaroo hop' at the 2024 Olympics went viral and drew widespread mockery?

Raygun: she lost all three battles without a single judge's vote, yet a month later a quirk of the ranking rules made her the federation's world number one.

What was the day job of Australia's 2024 Olympic b-girl?

Lecturer: she taught at Sydney's Macquarie University, and her own PhD thesis there was a study of gender in the city's breaking scene.

Refugee Team b-girl Manizha Talash was disqualified in Paris for wearing a cape with which slogan?

Free Afghan Women: she fled Kabul after the Taliban returned to power and outlawed dancing, and she was disqualified for displaying a political slogan.

Breaking debuted at the Youth Olympics in 2018 in which city?

Buenos Aires: the battles at Puerto Madero were the first dancesport at any Olympic event, and Paris's organisers put breaking forward for 2024 soon afterwards.

Olympic breaking was run by the World DanceSport Federation, a body set up to govern which kind of dancing?

Ballroom: the federation began in 1957 as a council of amateur ballroom dancers, and because the IOC recognises it as dancesport's governing body, breaking reached the Games under its wing.

Which singer and civil rights campaigner produced the hip-hop film Beat Street?

Harry Belafonte: the 'Day-O' singer was in his late fifties when he turned a journalist's story about New York's street scene into a film for a Hollywood studio.

In a '1990', the breaker spins continuously on what?

One hand: the breaker whips a one-armed handstand into a spin, and a pioneer who claims the move says he found it by accident while trying something else.

Which 2007 documentary followed five crews to the 2005 Battle of the Year?

Planet B-Boy: director Benson Lee went on to remake his own documentary as a 3D Hollywood drama, named after the contest, six years later.

Which 2004 anime gave its outlaw swordsman Mugen a fighting style built on breaking moves?

Samurai Champloo: its animators worked real breakers' moves into his sword fights, in a series that sets a hip-hop soundtrack against the age of the shoguns.

Malcolm McLaren, whose 'Buffalo Gals' video starred Rock Steady Crew, had earlier managed which punk band?

Sex Pistols: after punk he turned to New York hip-hop, and his 1982 single of scratching and square-dance calls carried breaking into the British top ten.

Boogaloo Shrimp, the breaker who played Turbo on film, later danced as the cartoon cat MC Skat Kat in whose video?

Paula Abdul: animators drew the cat over his moves for 'Opposites Attract', after a shoot so gruelling that its second day lasted 24 hours.

What is the circle of dancers in which each breaker takes a turn called?

Cipher: nobody marks it out, because the circle forms by itself once the dancing starts, and whoever steps into the middle dances free of counts and cues.

Which Brooklyn dance of mock combat between two partners lent breaking some of its standing moves?

Uprock: two rivals faced off miming punches and drawn weapons for a whole record, and breakers borrowed its jerks and taunts for their own upright openers.

Which former gang leader founded a hip-hop peace movement to steer youth from violence?

Afrika Bambaataa: he had risen to a commanding rank in the Black Spades gang, then led its members into his Universal Zulu Nation, named after the 1964 war film Zulu.

Years before MTV launched its rap show, which country aired the world's first weekly national TV show devoted to hip-hop?

France: H.I.P. H.O.P. went out on TF1 through 1984 with Sidney, the first Black presenter on French television, and set off a wave of new crews.

Breaking reached Japan in 1983 with a Rock Steady Crew tour and which film?

Wild Style: it reached Tokyo's cinemas a month before its Broadway run, and Rock Steady Crew toured with it, leaving the city's first breaking crews in their wake.

An 1898 film from which inventor's studio shows a street boy spinning on his head like a top?

Thomas Edison: his catalogue joked that the boy in A Street Arab 'will be bald-headed at an early age', some 35 years before the film often credited with the first headspin.

The breaking 'flare' is borrowed from the Thomas flair in which sport?

Gymnastics: America's Kurt Thomas, a 1978 world champion, made the swinging leg circle his trademark on pommel horse and floor, and breakers took it to the street.

In breaking slang, what is a dancer accused of when they copy a rival's moves?

Biting: the charge costs more than pride, because copied moves count against a breaker's originality mark, a fifth of the score at the Olympics.

Which IOC president said breaking was added to attract young people to the Olympics?

Thomas Bach: under his presidency host cities could propose extra sports of their own, and Paris chose breaking to fit its pitch of a youthful, urban Games.

Which breaker, the first American to qualify for Olympic breaking, won bronze in Paris?

Victor Montalvo: he booked his place by winning the 2023 world title in Belgium, having been taught at six by his father and uncle, twin brothers who were breaking pioneers in 1980s Mexico.

Hip-hop's founding DJ named his break-extending turntable trick after which fairground ride?

The merry-go-round: he said it took dancers 'back and forth with no slack', keeping the drums going so the floor never had to wait for the part it loved.