Breaking away: Sunny Choi’s six-figure Olympic gamble

PARIS — Sunny Choi was a “lost” college freshman when, on a drunken night out, she found her path to the Olympics.

She was a washed-up former gymnast at perhaps the most prestigious business school on the planet, Wharton, when she found a group of University of Pennsylvania students dancing.

They invited her to a class. She was, at the time, following a traditional path, via Penn to corporate America — but dispassionately, aimlessly. So she joined them. And there, first on a campus walkway, then at Penn’s famed Rotunda, she found her calling — she “stumbled into breaking.”

“Breaking” is the art form popularly known as breakdancing. It bloomed on Bronx streets in the 1970s. Some 50 years later, it’s a new Olympic sport. And Choi, 35, is “B-girl Sunny,” perhaps the most unlikely medal contender at these Paris Games. She’s the Tennessee-born daughter of Korean American Ph.D.s. A couple years ago, she was making six figures as a marketing executive at Estée Lauder. But she quit that job — “director of global creative operations for skin care” at the second-largest cosmetics company in the world — to pursue her passion, the one she found as a wayward freshman at Wharton.

Breaking became her “outlet,” her community, her escape from frat parties, and her purpose.

It became a forum for self-expression and self-discovery. “Breaking,” Choi says, “because it’s so artistic, requires me to really dig deep and figure out who I am.”

It became an avenue to happiness and, after 16 years, a ticket to the Olympics — a ticket young Sunny had fantasized about as a 3-year-old tutu-wearing gymnast.

The Games, though, were impossibly distant when she first linked up with Penn’s breaking club, Freaks of the Beat; those dreams weren’t even stirring in the depths of her mind.

“No,” Choi says with a laugh, as if amused by the absurdity of the thought, when asked if the possibility ever occurred to her. “Absolutely not.”

Following the ‘road to success’

Grace Sun Choi was born in 1988 to Jung-In Choi and Kyung-Ju Choi, a mathematician and polymer engineer who’d immigrated to Tennessee from Daegu, South Korea, to study.

Sunny, as they called her, was the third of their four kids, and they filled her life with opportunity. There were piano lessons; taekwondo classes; and a steadfast emphasis on academics.

But it was gymnastics, via TV, at the 1992 Olympics, that spellbound Sunny. She begged her mom to let her try the tumbling and twists. En route to her first day of gym at a local Y, she remembers asking dreamily: “Am I gonna win gold?!”

At 12, she and her family acknowledged that the answer was no. She continued on a non-elite track. She considered competing in college, but then tore up her knee — and anyway, she says, she was “really burnt out.”

Instead, she set off down the path that society told her to take. She registered for AP courses. She worked hard, so hard that she’d sometimes fall asleep during school. She got into Penn — and so, of course, she went.

But, she says now, “I think I always knew I didn’t want to be there. I was doing it because I felt like I had to, because this is the road to success.”

At Penn, she struggled. She partied. She drank. She’d show up to class, and slink to the back of the room, in sweats. Her GPA slipped. But expectations — societal, cultural, familial — refused to let her pick another path. So she stuck with this one.

She also stuck with breaking. The chance encounter with Freaks of the Beat led to regular gatherings. The raw, explosive movements lured her, and eventually pulled her into cyphers, the human-ringed circles where breakers battle or perform. “Over time,” Choi says, “I really fell in love with exploring my body’s physical limits.”

“But it was always a side thing,” she says; “just a hobby.”

She graduated in 2011, and sought out marketing jobs, in part to fund her passion, in part because, well, that’s what she was supposed to do.

She climbed the corporate ladder, sometimes working 60-hour weeks. She “compiled and modeled researched data,” and “presented unique promotional ideas.” She “utilized computer tools such as Nielsen’s Buzzmetrics,” led weekly meetings, analyzed “vertical markets,” allocated budgets, “provided creative briefs,” and much more, according to a LinkedIn résumé that looks nothing like the average Olympian’s.

And she was “miserable.”

She was living in New York, shopping at Whole Foods, making good money, fulfilling all those expectations. She, however, felt unfulfilled.

“I was doing all the things to check the life boxes off, to be successful,” Choi says. “My whole life had been dictated by these standards that the world had set for me.” She realized, finally, in 2022, that it was up to her to break free.

‘I have to stop stopping myself’

Ever since that late night at Penn, and subsequent outings throughout Philadelphia, B-girl Sunny has grappled with self-doubt. Some of it stems from a childhood of invisibility, as an Asian American in mostly white spaces, as an outsider everywhere she went. “I never felt like I fit in,” she says.

Some of it also likely stems from breaking’s heritage. Its founding fathers were Black and brown men who danced for escape on Bronx streets. Sunny, in her own words, was “this quiet, reserved Asian girl” at an Ivy League school, unsure whether she belonged — and, more acutely, unsure whether she could hit the power moves that founders pioneered and fellow Penn students now performed.

Her inhibitions, though, were always self-imposed. Once she overcame them, she came to adore breaking’s artistry.

It was the polar opposite of her 9-to-5 jobs, where “you can just show up every day and put a facade on. You’re rewarded for being a robot,” she says. At the dance studios she began frequenting in New York, on the other hand, “I can’t show up and be a robot — because if I do that, I’m not dancing. I’m not showing the world who I am.”

That, at its core, is breaking. It has evolved, considerably, from its 20th-century roots, from a pastime into a competitive circuit. But it has retained some of its essence. At competitions such as the Olympics, breakers are judged, in part, on creativity, performativity and personality — subjective, comparative measures that require each of them to improvise, and to be authentically, unapologetically themselves.

That’s who Choi tried to be as she broke onto the competitive scene. “A lot of breakers go out and they’re want-to-rip-your-head-off aggressive,” Choi says. She, on the other hand — well, “There’s no part of me that wants to do that. I can’t. So I just kept smiling.” She smiles as she flashes peace signs at opponents. She smiled as she went international. In 2015, she won her first major title, at Outbreak Europe in Slovakia. She finished second at a World Urban Games, and then at her first world championships.

And yet, in December 2020, when the International Olympic Committee confirmed that breaking would debut at Paris 2024, Choi struggled to even conceptualize that she was a contender. The following year, at a training camp for elite U.S. breakers near Philly, a coach asked aspiring Olympians to identify themselves; everyone raised a hand — except Choi.

Her hesitation was twofold. One piece was an inherent conflict that has split the breaking community. “Because it’s born from the streets, and so many of the Olympic sports feel very elegant,” Choi explained, “it actually took quite a while for me to wrap my head around, like, do I even want to go?”

The other piece was her six-figure salary. It allowed her to live a comfortable life — but limited her to a few breaking sessions per week. She tried to do both.

“It wasn’t sustainable,” she told NBC. “I was really breaking myself down from being too busy.”

For months, she grappled with the conundrum. “I can’t fathom changing my entire life trajectory for this,” she thought. The world had scripted for her a plan: money, house, marriage, kids. “And the Olympics throws that off,” she said.

Then, one day, while bawling in her car outside practice, she realized that her inhibition was “a really deep-rooted fear of failure.”

“I, my whole life, hadn’t allowed myself to dream, because I was scared of failing,” Choi says.

And before long, in late 2022, she decided: “I have to stop stopping myself.”

Bye-bye corporate America

So she quit the job. She gave Estée Lauder a few months’ notice. She called her parents, who’d initially been skeptical of breaking; but her mom reassured her: I’ll support you. You’ll be successful in whatever you pursue.

In January 2023, she dove full-time into breaking. She hired a strength coach. She committed to this scary new life, and she loved it.

“For so long, I was showing up physically, but not mentally,” Choi says. “Now I’m able to show up mentally, and life is just so different.”

She validated the leap at last year’s Pan-American Games. With a gold medal there, she qualified for the Olympics. And she became an atypical flag-bearer for breaking, a spokeswoman for a community that has not unanimously embraced this newfound spotlight. To many, the Olympic competition feels detached from breaking’s roots as one of hip-hop’s original pillars; and the culture co-opted to primarily benefit the white European men who run Olympic sport — rather than breaking’s Bronx pioneers.

“Without those communities, I wouldn’t be here,” Choi says. To square the conflict, she and other Olympic breakers have tried to speak about the pioneers — the OGs or “elders,” as some call them — at every chance they get. The goal, as Choi said, is to “carry that legacy forward.”

And at times, “it can be a burden,” Choi says. There is scrutiny and pressure to carry it in a proper way. “But most days,” she continues, “it really just feels like an opportunity.”

She is here, in Paris, to “show the world what we’re so passionate about as breakers.” She has fully immersed herself in a culture that accepts and respects anyone who respects and elevates it. After Paris, with breaking off the Olympic program four years later in Los Angeles, she wants to open a studio or community center in Queens, where she now lives.

“I do still plan to dance,” she clarifies. “But I want to shift gears, and give back.” She wants to give the next generation what breaking, by such remarkable happenstance, has given her.