The smell of sweat hits you as soon as you enter the room. It clings to the air and dampens the walls. The BeatBox Bar is a tightly packed event space at the back of Boxpark Wembley, a stone’s throw away from England’s national football stadium. Inside, 50 or so breaking athletes are warming up for a friendly competition on an otherwise unremarkable Sunday afternoon.

The Primal Instincts Crew Anniversary Jam is scheduled to start in around 30 minutes. It’s four in the afternoon, but it’s dark indoors, bar a few red and white spotlights on the ceiling. Kevin ‘DJ Renegade’ Gopie is already in position, spinning funk records from inside his booth. In front of his decks are five boxes acting as makeshift seats, from which today’s judges will score the dancers. And in front of them is a 10ft-by-10ft temporary dance floor that’s been brought in and stuck down for the contest.

Around the edge of the room, dancers mingle and chat as they prepare for the three-on-three competition. Miniature dance circles break out organically in separate corners of the room. A dancer jumps into the middle, does their thing and jumps back out again, allowing the next performer their moment. Every so often, another of today’s competitors will enter the room and spot a friendly face. A pair see each other, hug, dap each other up and then start dancing around one another. A breaking battle, it’s later explained to me, is a conversation. These two just said hello.

The Primal Instincts Jam may be a small community event, but somewhere in the room are British breaking’s bright young things – three men who in a few months’ time could be representing Team GB at the Paris Olympics.

Once the room is fully limbered up, the day’s MCs, Aleon and Swifty, kick off the competition, and dancers begin to step up to the floor in their teams of three. Athletes of all ages are competing today. Some are fresh-faced relative newcomers, while others have clearly been in the game for a while.

Eventually a team of three athletes steps on to the dance floor. They’re introduced as ‘Brits Abroad’. The atmosphere suddenly shifts. Athletes who up until that moment had been interested only in their own preparation stop what they’re doing and turn their heads.

In a three-on-three battle, one athlete from each team steps forward and uses their body to deliver a message – which can be aggressive, funny or anything in between. A member of the opposing team or crew will then move into the foreground and offer a response.

B-boy Sunni Brummitt has been breaking since he was 10 years old.

What the three lean and athletic men in their mid-to-late twenties on the mats right now seem to be saying is: this is where the bar is, can you reach it? They move at twice the speed of everyone else and are more confident and deliberate with their actions. ‘If we don’t win, it’s a problem,’ B-Boy Sheku, aka Sam Phillips, 26, tells me with a wry smile once he and the other GB breaking athletes have finished their first battle of the day.

Of course, the three Olympic athletes do win the competition, which ultimately amounts to a group training session. B-Boy Kid Karam – aka Karam Singh, 26 – also wins Dancer of the Day. Together with the third British athlete, B-Boy Sunni – or Sunni Brummitt, 29 – the trio knows that much tougher competitions lie ahead. Olympic rules mean that only two male breakers from the same nation can compete at the Games, but at the BeatBox Bar today, all three athletes still hope to be on the dance floor when the sport makes its Olympic debut – and all three have worked hard and sacrificed a lot to get there.

Under Pressure

The Primal Instincts Jam isn’t the first time that Singh, Brummitt and Phillips have competed under the name ‘Brits Abroad’. The trio, who all usually dance in separate crews but have been brought together for the Olympics, used the moniker during a three-on-three battle at last year’s World Breaking Championships. Singh explains that they wanted a name that wasn’t too try-hard but also made it obvious to everyone that they found the whole thing a little bit silly. They settled on Brits Abroad, and the name stuck. It seems pertinent: the trio has had to travel the globe in the battle to qualify for the Games.

Since breaking was announced as an Olympic sport in December 2020, the race has been on to bag one of 32 (16 for B-Boys and 16 for B-Girls) places on offer at Paris 2024. As hosts, France automatically get one entry per gender, while a further two entries per gender are Universality Places – those reserved for athletes from underrepresented nations. All other spots are up for grabs, and breakers have been travelling the world to either secure a direct entry to the Games or amass enough points to enter the Olympic Qualifier Series: a two-date tournament that took place in Shanghai and Budapest in May and June 2024. The demanding schedule created as a result, which athletes have been grinding though for the best part of two years, exists in addition to the sport’s existing ‘cultural’ calendar.

Breaking is attracting more sponsors, more brand deals and more interest than ever. Singh is sponsored by Nike and has a brand deal with Samsung, while Brummitt works with Red Bull and Adidas. Both recently became ambassadors for Eurostar. But the sport’s Olympic inclusion has also placed additional demands on athletes’ time, funds and bodies. ‘I definitely feel the pressure,’ says Singh. ‘It’s gone from being a hobby and something that you want to do all the time to at times feeling like it’s a chore.

‘You’re doing it for your country on the biggest stage possible. You’re doing it for your sponsorships, you’re doing it for the people that support you. You’re doing it because you don’t want to miss out on this opportunity of being at the only Olympics we might have, but also being there for the first time. Obviously, there’s a lot of added pressure that comes with that.’

B-boy Kid Karam has ambitions to compete on the world stage.

Towards the back end of 2023, Singh noticed he was missing a small patch of hair on his head. Soon that patch became two, which quickly turned into three. Before he knew it, they were all over his scalp and beard. He was diagnosed with alopecia and took to wearing a cap as he continued to fulfil his commercial commitments. Eventually, he explains, he had to take time away from Olympic qualification to recuperate. ‘I was treating every day like it had to be a training camp, rather than treating it like, let me just go and create something and enjoy it,’ he says.

Like Singh, Brummitt has had to deal with the pressure that comes with a challenging schedule. ‘With the Olympics and these big platforms becoming involved, it’s a bit more fruitful,’ he says. ‘But we have to travel eight hours to a different country to work, and we do that back-to-back every week for the same money that you probably get in a call centre. You have to really love the culture to do it.’

A Breakout Success

With breaking’s Olympic debut, the sport may be at the zenith of public consciousness once again, but it has already seen its peaks and troughs. When Gopie entered the scene in the mid-to-late 80s, breaking was huge, thanks to its association with the burgeoning hip hop movement, and its inclusion in movies such as Flashdance and Beat Street.

By the time David Gaviria, breaking athlete for the Primal Instincts Crew and host of the Primal Instincts Jam, entered the scene in the 90s, breaking had already died off and come back around, re-emerging as the ‘brand-new old-school’ – a term Gaviria uses to describe breaking’s embrace of a ‘more conventional and purist approach to the dance’.

In the 2000s, Red Bull got involved, and in 2004 the first Red Bull BC One tournament took place. ‘Before the Olympics, technically, Red Bull was the Olympics,’ explains Gaviria. In 2016, word started to spread that the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF) wanted to get breaking into the Olympics – a process that began with a trial at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Brummitt has been adjusting to the demands of a newly global sport.

To be included in the Youth Games, breaking needed to move away from being an art form judged subjectively and develop into a sport that could be judged to agreed standards. The WDSF reached out to Gopie and another breaker, Niels ‘Storm’ Robitzky from Germany, asking for their help devising a judging model.

‘We needed to develop something that allowed athletes to be judged fairly and made sure the audience understood what was going on,’ Gopie explains. The model he and Robitzky devised was built around three ‘domains’: physical, artistic and interpretative (see below).

Breaking turned out to be one of the major successes of the Youth Games. According to NBC Olympics, it garnered over a million viewers, far outpacing audiences for other sports, while The Washington Post reported that ‘breaking turned in bigger social media numbers than any other sport in Buenos Aires’. Calais-born B-Boy Martin Lejeune won a silver medal in that competition, and his success is thought to be one of the reasons why France pushed for breaking to be included at Paris 2024.

The judging model has already started to filter down to smaller events and was one of the reasons why Gaviria and his Primal Instincts Crew had five judges, rather than the traditional three, at the Jam they organised. Gopie, meanwhile, is hoping that more things from breaking’s top table filter down to community level once the world has seen breaking at ‘the big boy Olympics’.

‘There’s this idea of breaking being this “hood” thing,’ Gopie says. ‘[Now] if you want to organise an event, access to venues is going to be different. Before, if you went to PureGym and you were breaking, they’d kick you out, but now, you can be like, “No, I’m training for the Olympics, mate.” It’s a completely different game.’

Changing The Game

It’s not just judging or breaking’s perception that has changed, athletes’ priorities have, too. ‘When I used to go to training sessions 15 or 20 years ago, the session would be [scheduled] for three hours, and people would break for 20 minutes in those three hours,’ he says. ‘Most of the time, they were just chatting and sitting around. It was more of a social thing… Now it’s 20 minutes of rest, and two and a half hours of bang, bang, bang.’

To get to the top of the sport now requires a new level of professionalism, as well as athleticism. When Singh won a silver medal at the European Breaking Championships in 2022, it was a major success, both for him and for British breaking. But it also prompted him to appraise his training routine. What would it take to win gold? He started supplementing his training with high-intensity gym work and has spoken with multiple nutritionists in an effort to wring out every marginal gain he can.

‘When Karam first came to me, he asked if I could help him improve his energy levels and dynamism, as these would go a long way to improving his mental and physical abilities while battling,’ says Singh’s PT Kirk Gibbons, whose usual clientele includes boxers and superbike racers.

When he’s not competing, a training day for Singh starts with an hour of body-weight work, including ‘pull-ups, press-ups, sit-ups and a lot of core strength and callisthenics’, he says. That’s followed by 40 minutes of stretching. The middle of the day is then used to handle commercial requirements, refuel and rest, before beginning a breaking session at 6pm. His training day finishes at 8pm or 8.30pm. ‘It’s almost like I wake up to work out, and then I’m resting to train,’ he says. ‘My whole day is [organised] around feeling good enough to be able to have a productive session.’

Singh has been working with performance coaches and is taking an athlete’s approach to breaking.

Singh typically works out with Gibbons at his local David Lloyd gym in Derby once a week, and the pair work on replicating his typical heart-rate zone in competition. ‘Instead of working in reps or sets, we’re working for a time period,’ Singh says. ‘It’s like mini circuits and sprints for a minute or 40 seconds, rather than doing five sets of this.’

Because of all the work he puts in, there was a time when he would feel exhausted during his day and struggle to stay present through all of his commitments. The nutritionists he spoke to identified a clear problem: he wasn’t consuming enough calories for the work he was doing.

‘We had a long conversation about introducing an extra meal or having double what I would normally have. Sometimes I’d have porridge after training and sometimes I’d have an egg on toast. They said I should probably be having both of those and then an extra smoothie before training, a piece of fruit or a nutrition bar during training, and then eat after training, too,’ he says.

That information was new to Singh – and this way of thinking is new to a sport that has only recently demanded adopting an athlete’s mentality. But, as Brummitt says, trying to implement this high-performance culture, on top of the travel requirements, has stretched many athletes close to breaking point.

‘In the last two months, I’ve been in Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Latvia, Lithuania, Paris, Spain, Indonesia and Seattle,’ he says. ‘So trying to have a sleep schedule that’s on point around that is just impossible.’

Still, athletes such as Singh and Brummitt are part of the first generation of breakers who are having to view the discipline through a sporting lens, and even though breaking won’t be a part of the next Olympics in Los Angeles, it’s hoped that it will return to the competition in 2032. Whether that happens or not, Gopie is already seeing a new generation of faster and stronger athletes and is hoping more are able to break out once the world has seen the sport in action.

‘I was in Japan two weeks ago,’ he says, ‘and I’m just like, what’s going on? And that’s having been around the scene for 40 years. It’s different, man.’

Moving Targets

Breaking started as an art form, and that can make it difficult to judge. Kevin ‘DJ Renegade’ Gopie, who helped to develop the scoring system, talks you through the three key criteria.

1. Physical

Dancers are judged on factors such as their body control, their use of space, the number and variety of moves they’re able to execute, as well as strength and athleticism.

2. Artistic

‘The artistic side is more about what makes you unique,’ says Gopie. Dancers are scored on the originality of their content, their stage presence and personality, and their ability to compose rounds.

3. Interpretative

‘This is really about time,’ says Gopie. ‘Do you understand the phrasing of the music? Do you understand how you’re connected to the music?’ It also takes into account how athletes react to what their opponent is doing. Breaking is a two-way conversation.