Breaking
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7correct to beat the crowd
49 free Breaking trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Breaking went from a rec room on Sedgwick Avenue to the Place de la Concorde in fifty years. It began at DJ Kool Herc's Bronx parties in 1973, when dancers waited for the drum break to do their best moves, and it reached the Olympic programme in Paris 2024, where a Japanese b-girl and a Canadian b-boy took the first gold medals and an Australian academic's kangaroo hop became the most talked-about routine of the Games. These 49 questions cover the whole arc: the four elements, the Balti-free vocabulary of toprock, freezes, windmills and 1990s, Rock Steady Crew and Crazy Legs, the films that carried the dance around the world (Flashdance, Wild Style, Breakin'), and the competitions that rebuilt it in the 1990s: Battle of the Year, Red Bull BC One and the Korean scene that started with a single VHS tape. The expert tier asks about a 1933 headspin, the Juba dance and the crew that gave Phil Wizard his name. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or use it for a hip-hop night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Breaking developed in which New York City borough?
The Bronx
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.
Q 02Breaking was one of four sports Paris picked for its 2024 Games, with skateboarding, sport climbing and which other?
Surfing
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.
Q 03Which DJ coined the terms 'b-boy' and 'b-girl' for the dancers at his parties?
DJ Kool Herc
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.
Q 04Along with footwork, power moves and freezes, what is the fourth element of breaking?
Toprock
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.
Q 05Which future Oscar winner danced as a breaker behind Lionel Richie at the closing ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics?
Cuba Gooding Jr.
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.
Q 06Cindy Campbell threw hip-hop's founding party in 1973 to raise money for what?
School clothes
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.
Q 07Which Incredible Bongo Band track, later remade by the Sugarhill Gang, is often called hip-hop's national anthem?
Apache
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.
Q 08Which singer did many of breaking's pioneers name as 'the first b-boy'?
James Brown
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.
Q 09Films starring which martial artist are cited as an influence by early breakers?
Bruce Lee
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.
Q 10Which subtitle of a 1984 breaking-movie sequel became a running joke as the name for any follow-up?
Electric Boogaloo
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.
Q 11Which power move does Rock Steady Crew's president say he found by accident when a backspin kept on rolling?
Windmill
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.
Q 12Rock Steady Crew's cameo in which film first showed breaking to audiences around the world?
Flashdance
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.
Q 13Who doubled for Jennifer Beals in the breaking move of her 1983 audition scene?
Crazy Legs
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.
Q 21Which country's b-girl won the first women's Olympic breaking gold?
Japan
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.
Q 22Alongside DJing, rapping and breaking, what is the fourth original element of hip-hop culture?
Graffiti
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.
Q 23Which country's breaker won the first men's Olympic breaking gold?
Canada
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.
Q 14Which 1984 dance film gave rapper Ice-T his first acting role, as a club MC?
Breakin'
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.
Q 15Street dancers Ozone and Turbo rule the boardwalk of which Los Angeles beach community in a 1984 dance film?
Venice
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.
Q 16Which country hosted the first international breaking competition, in the early 1990s?
Germany
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.
Q 17Which martial art do breaking's moves so resemble that its pioneers are still asked whether they borrowed from it?
Capoeira
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.
Q 18Which future action star appears as an uncredited dancing spectator in a 1984 Cannon dance film?
Jean-Claude Van Damme
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.
Q 19Which energy drink company has run breaking's one-on-one world final, BC One, since 2004?
Red Bull
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.
Q 20Which name for the dance do many of its pioneers reject as a label coined by the media?
Breakdancing
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.
Q 24Often lumped in with breaking, which West Coast style did Don Campbell create while trying to do the Funky Chicken?
Locking
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.
Q 25Which Paris landmark hosted the Olympic breaking battles in 2024?
Place de la Concorde
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.
Q 26At the Paris Olympics, who chose each battle's music?
The DJ
The DJ: nobody on the floor knew what was coming, so every round was improvised to whatever played while nine judges voted on it.
Q 27Which of these was one of the five criteria Olympic breaking judges marked?
Technique
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.
Q 28Which b-girl's 'kangaroo hop' at the 2024 Olympics went viral and drew widespread mockery?
Raygun
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.
Q 29What was the day job of Australia's 2024 Olympic b-girl?
Lecturer
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.
Q 30Refugee Team b-girl Manizha Talash was disqualified in Paris for wearing a cape with which slogan?
Free Afghan Women
Free Afghan Women: she fled Kabul after the Taliban returned to power and outlawed dancing, and she was disqualified for displaying a political slogan.