The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris will mark the debut of a new sport, breaking. Ahead of their Team USA debuts, meet breakers Jeffrey Louis and Victor Montalvo.
Louis, 29, tells PEOPLE that he started breaking when he was 10 years old. “My brother studied at school and then he came home and taught me, and as he studied, so am I”, says the athlete who is often called by the nickname “Jeffro”.
Montalvo, 30, started breaking at the age of six. “I remember my dad and his twin, they used to go to Mexico,” he says. “They would always do B Street, and I remember me and my cousin and my brother just imitating the dancers.”
To this day, Montalv’s father “is still dancing,” he says. “He’s still going backwards. He’ll come to the yard or he’ll come while I’m training with my friends with his beer, and he’ll be like, yo, hold the beer for me.”
Both Louis and Montalvo say they “never” thought breaking would become an Olympic sport. “That thought was out of my head,” says Montalvo. “Honestly, we didn’t know it was going to be in the Olympics until 2020. So it was out of our head, out of reach.”
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Jeffro of Team United States competes with Matita (not pictured) in the Breaking – B-Boys semifinals on Day 15 of the Santiago 2023 Pan Am Games on November 4, 2023 in Santiago, Chile.
Al Bello/Getty
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Louis also says it “never crossed his mind” that the fracture would become an Olympic event. Instead, “I just did it for the love of it,” says Louis. “But when it became possible, I started training like an athlete.”
As the world is about to be introduced to breaking, Montalvo and Louis are excited to share the sport.
“A lot of people have the misconception of smashing and stereotyping, butt-spinning, head-spinning, cardboard-floor-dancing, and floor-rolling, but it’s more than that,” says Montalvo.
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Victor Montalvo of the United States performs on stage in the B-boy Final during the 2023 WDSF World Break Championships on September 24, 2023 in Leuven, Belgium.
Pier Marco Tacca/Getty
“You’re basically bringing your creativity, your imagination to this art form, and you’re creating art and you’re bringing your own personality,” he adds. “We’re basically like a brush on a dance floor, creating shapes and concepts. So it’s all about creativity, originality, a strong foundation and honoring the people who came before us.”
As for Louis, he wants new smash fans to know that the sport is “really complex” and artistic.
“The biggest misconception is that it’s all about flashy moves, but it’s not just back flips and head spins. There’s intricate movement, style and originality. All those flips and mid-air moves are done, so the question is, ‘What do you add to it?’ ‘ It can be exhausting, but when I’m stressed, I go back to why I started doing this: the pure love of dance.”
Moreover, breaking through to the Olympics adds another level of difficulty as athletes will enter the event unaware of the music they will be competing to, Montalvo explains.
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“We don’t know what the DJ is going to play. They have a great playlist, but we just don’t know what songs they’re going to play, and it’s been difficult for a while because we can not play original music at certain events,” he says, citing copyright issues.
“So we can’t listen to the original songs, which encourages us to dance better. And sometimes you listen to sampled music and it doesn’t feel the same as the original music. So it’s really hard for We have to adapt at this point.”
To learn more about all the Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, visit TeamUSA.com. Watch the Paris Olympics and Paralympics starting July 26 on NBC and Peacock.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education