Break it down: Dancers begin charting path to 2024 Paris Olympics

Associated PressNov 22, 2022, 2:42 PM EST

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Breaking is in Victor Montalvo’s blood. He is a descendant of twin breakers — his father and uncle — who were performing in Mexico long before they taught a young Montalvo to spin on his back.

Born in Kissimmee, Florida, the 28-year-old who also goes by B-Boy Victor has mastered the foundations of the dance form. He has power. He has the flavor and swagger expected of a diehard b-boy. His movement syncs with the breakbeat flowing from the DJ’s turntables.

Scribble, chirp, rip, boom, blip.

He hopes to take breaking further than his relatives ever dreamt, to battle his way to a medal ceremony, when the now-global dance art debuts at the Olympics less than two years from now.

“I feel like I have a really high chance,” Montalvo told The Associated Press.

He is among dozens of champion b-boys and b-girls — a term for a male or female entrenched in the culture of hip hop — who are charting a path to the 2024 Games in Paris. The International Olympic Committee announced two years ago that breaking would become an official Olympic sport, a development that divided the breaking community between those excited for the larger platform and those concerned about the art form’s purity.

But after the Red Bull BC One World Final, held earlier this month in the birthplace of hip hop and a short distance from the very streets where Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers pioneered the art of breaking, the field of Olympic competitors is starting to take shape. The Nov. 12 event also attracted some of the original b-boys and b-girls, as the hip hop community prepares to celebrate 50 years since the culture’s founding in 1973.

“You never thought that something you were doing for fun was going to go around the world,” said Douglas “Dancin’ Doug” Colón, a b-boy of the first generation of breakers from Harlem who beamed with pride over the dance form’s acceptance into the Olympics.

Along with Colón, first generation b-boy Trixie sat near a circular stage in the center of Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom. One by one, Red Bull BC One World Final competitors from Canada, China, France, Italy, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Venezuela took to the battle stage. The energy drink beverage company runs the world’s largest breaking competition.

The OGs offered blessings to their descendants by giving them dap — a friendly gesture of greeting in the Black and Latino communities that communicates solidarity and well wishes to the recipient. Joe Conzo, Jr, a photographer known in the community as “Joey Snapz,” who documented hip hop in the Bronx from its infancy, also sat stageside taking pictures of the Olympic hopefuls.

“Nothing’s going to change the culture, the culture stays the same,” Colón said. “Even though it’s now an Olympic sport, people back in the hood will still be doing their thing.”

Victor Alicea, a Red Bull BC One World Final judge, told the AP that judging competitions within the hip hop culture has always been very subjective. But that won’t be the case with the Paris Olympics, where officials will use a newly developed judging system to decide which b-boy or b-girl bested their opponent in one-on-one battles.

The Trivium judging system, created for the debut of breaking at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, is a digital scoring platform that allows judges to react in real time to breakers’ physical, artistic and interpretative qualities or their “body, mind and soul.” A panel of five judges scores each breaker on creativity, personality, technique, variety, performativity and musicality. The scores can adjust throughout the battle, based on how a breaker responds to their opponent.

Scores can be lowered if a breaker “bites,” or copies, a set of moves from their opponent. Misbehavior, such as deliberate physical contact with an opponent, and other unsportsmanlike conduct can also lower a breaker’s score.

“I look for someone that takes over the floor. It’s a battle. It’s not just you dance and then I dance. You’ve got to bring it,” said Alicea, who is also known as B-boy Kid Glyde.

Montalvo, who was ranked as the world’s top b-boy after a world championship competition in Paris last December, said his path to the Olympics will require intense training. It will also require more winning performances at competitions sanctioned by the World DanceSport Federation, an IOC-approved body administering the battles. Breakers who do well in those events score points that help them qualify for the Paris Games. Olympic qualifiers kick off in September and run through June 2024.

At the end of the process, 16 b-boys and 16 b-girls will be allowed to compete over two days at the iconic Place de la Concorde, an outdoor public square in Paris.

That gives Olympic hopefuls lots of opportunities to sharpen their skills for the high stakes battles.

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B-BOY VICTOR

What sets Montalvo apart from other b-boys, he said, is his command of judge-favored foundations of breaking: “toprock” moves, footwork, “downrock” moves done closer to the floor, “power” moves showing acrobatics and strength, along with the classic “headspins,” “windmills” and “freeze” poses.

“I feel like the foundations are the most important thing,” he said. “I see a lot of dancers doing big moves, but then they don’t have those small details. They don’t know how to get out of those big moves. It’s important to create a story, and the foundations are like creating a story.”

B-BOY YU-KI

During a Red Bull BC One quarterfinal round battle against Japan’s Yuki Minatozaki, Montalvo transitioned from a windmill into a downrock move in which his legs moved back and forth so quickly that they looked like turning Double Dutch ropes. Minatozaki responded with a smirk, half-hearted applause and sarcastic thumbs up — all in the spirit of good sportsmanship — before exploding into a headspin and showcasing energetic standing footwork.

“It feels great that the sport now has a lot more eyeballs on it,” Minatozaki, who goes by B-boy Yu-Ki, told the AP through a translator. The 23-year-old has been breaking since the age of five. He intends to seek a spot in the Paris Games, he said.

Minatozaki lost his battle against Montalvo, who also went on to the final to defeat Lee-Lou Demierre of the Netherlands, another likely Olympic contender. That victory did not earn Montalvo points toward qualifying for the Olympics.

B-GIRL INDIA

India Sardjoe, a 16-year-old breaker from the Netherlands, won the Red Bull BC One World Final b-girl title. She said she planned to focus next on competing in crew battles – this entails a team of breakers competing against another for a group title and bragging rights, reminiscent of breaking’s roots in the Bronx. Sardjoe was fresh off of claiming the top honor at the European Breaking Championships, a WDSF event held in Manchester, England on Nov. 6.

The Red Bull title is an accomplishment, nonetheless.

“I had to battle the defending champion, so that’s not nothing,” Sardjoe said. “But I was super happy to battle against her.”

B-GIRL LOGISTX

Sardjoe defeated 19-year-old Logan Edra, also known as B-girl Logistx, who won last year’s Red Bull BC One World Final in Gdansk, Poland. Hailing from San Diego, Edra began breaking at age eight, after first training in ballet and jazz. Her father nudged her into hip hop lessons.

Like Sardjoe and Montalvo, Edra told the AP she will compete in WDSF events over the next year and half for a spot in the Olympics. On Saturday, she competed in the Breaking for Gold Challenge Series in Tokyo and took home a silver medal behind Lithuania’s Dominika Banevič, known as B-Girl Nicka, who won gold.

“I’m competing against the best of the best,” Edra said. “Because I have such a high standard for myself, I try to out-train everybody. The training is crazy — I’ve got bruises on my elbows and my knees from practicing moves over and over. It’s a lot of commitment because we don’t have as many resources as other sports do.”

B-GIRL ISIS

Isis Alexandra Granda Chalen, a b-girl who grew up in Ecuador before moving to the U.S., started young in ballet, folk and contemporary dance. But breaking spoke to her rebellious nature, particularly at a time when she questioned if those other dance forms were aligned with her dreams.

“The moment that I understood that I have more responsibility for myself, I put more work into breaking and I got the opportunities to be here,” Chalen, 27, said ahead of the Red Bull BC One World Final.

“Now, we’re going to do this transition, from artists to athletes,” she said of her Olympic dreams. “It’s a big opportunity for every country. I came from Latin America, where there aren’t as many opportunities. But the Olympics are for everybody.”

B-GIRL SUNNY

Sunny Choi, a Queens, New York-based b-girl who won the 2022 Red Bull BC One Cypher USA in September, said there’s an accessibility to the art and sport of breaking that will make it a huge draw at the Paris Olympics. She hopes to earn a spot on the U.S. team.

“We have a lot of diversity in breaking, which is really beautiful about what we do, because there aren’t many financial barriers to entry,” Choi told the AP. “If you have a clean floor and, nowadays, access to YouTube or something where you can learn, and some music, you can just do this on your own.”

She said her nascent Olympic journey has already required personal and professional sacrifices that initially had her questioning if she wanted to compete at all.

“I’m one of those all or nothing people,” Choi said. “I’ve done a lot of soul searching to remove some of the mental blocks. I feel like this journey is going to pull out a lot from me and I just need to be ready for that.”

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World figure skating championships the latest chapter of Deanna Stellato-Dudek’s comeback

By Philip HershMar 20, 2023, 3:44 PM EDT

There are so many improbabilities in the story of how Canadian pair team Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps got to this week’s world figure skating championships that the whole thing reads like a flight of fancy.

You start with a talented junior singles skater from suburban Chicago named Deanna Stellato, whose skates had sat in a closet at her mother’s home for 16 years after injuries pushed her from the sport.

You bring her back to the skating world in 2016 as a married woman of 33 with a different name, Deanna Stellato-Dudek, and in a different event, pairs, making the switch on the recommendation of U.S. Figure Skating high performance director Mitch Moyer.

You have Moyer able to make that suggestion because he coincidentally was visiting a Florida rink the day Stellato-Dudek went there to sound out her old singles coach, Cindy Caprel, about the idea of a comeback.

You end her 12-year career as an aesthetician in a plastic surgery practice and have her go back to the ice, keeping her apart for long stretches from her husband of nine years, Michael Dudek, a Chicago-based turnover management specialist.

You have her begin a pairs’ career in summer 2016 as the partner of a 2014 Olympian, Nathan Bartholomay, with whom she would win bronze medals at the 2018 and 2019 U.S. Championships before the partnership ended when a bum knee made Bartholomay’s competitive future uncertain.

“I was still gung-ho on continuing until 2022,” Stellato-Dudek said.

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You hear her talk of having messaged everyone she ever had met in skating to see if they knew of a possible new partner and have one reply, from 2018 Olympic pairs’ bronze medalist Meagan Duhamel and her husband, Bruno Marcotte, a pairs’ coach, tell Stellato-Dudek they had the perfect guy for her.

You have it be a guy she had never heard of, Maxime Deschamps, a French-Canadian from suburban Montreal who had skated with eight previous partners, finished no higher than fifth at the senior level at the Canadian Championships with any of them and thought of ending his competitive career many times.

“Yes, it’s kind of an unusual pairing,” said their coach, Josée Picard.

You have their tryout in June 2019 be the skating version of love at first sight, leading Stellato-Dudek to cancel scheduled sessions with other potential partners.

You have their getting-to-know-you workouts in Montreal stopped cold by the Covid pandemic, forcing them to train outside whenever there was ice for much of a year.

“We made the best of what we could do,” Deschamps said. “It was a really hard time. We questioned ourselves a lot. The goals we were setting up as markers keep us going and able to pass through those hard times.”

You have them begin this season after the first extensive offseason training of their partnership and watch them win a silver medal at Skate America that makes Stellato-Dudek, 39, the oldest medalist in the 25-season history of the Grand Prix Series.

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You have them win their second Grand Prix event before Stellato-Dudek comes down with a respiratory virus (RSV, not Covid) that has her coughing, feverish and listless and eventually paralyzes her left vocal cord, inhibiting her swallowing, breathing and speech to the point she needs ongoing work with a speech pathologist to relearn how to talk.

“It was a big setback,” Picard said of the lingering sickness. “It was three months, and we had to adjust a lot of things and diminish the amount of training and do everything very, very carefully.”

You have doctors tell her there is no risk in continuing to train and compete (other than the risks that come with pairs’ skating, in which the woman is flung across the rink and carried some seven feet above a hard and slippery surface), but it isn’t easy training while constantly out of breath and having difficulty swallowing water. That Stellato-Dudek would keep at it impressed her coach.

“Just to come back at 30-some years old and do a totally different discipline in the first place shows that somebody has a lot of ambitions and a lot of goals and a lot of guts,” Picard said. “This just amplifies it, you know, to show that she’s not giving up, and she has all the willpower, and she wants to succeed.”

You have her fight through the Canadian national championships out of her desire to give Deschamps, 31, a shot at his first national title – and have them win.

“I really had a strong will,” Stellato-Dudek said. “I thought to myself, ‘If this was the Olympic Games, I would be skating.’

“Max really stepped up in our partnership during that time. Often, it’s not both partners who are able to give 100 percent. For those three months, I was able to give 80 percent, and Max was making up for that 20 percent and still giving his 100 percent, so he was giving 120.”

You have her healthy as they go to the world championships beginning Wednesday in Saitama, Japan, with a decent chance for Stellato-Dudek, now 39, to win her second world medal, the other a silver from the world junior championships 23 years ago.

And, finally, you have them looking toward the 2026 Olympics where she could, at the age of 42 years and 229 days, be the oldest woman to compete in Olympic figure skating since 1928 and the third oldest in history, according to Olympedia.org. (That’s assuming Stellato-Dudek gets Canadian citizenship in time for a chance at the team; it is required for her to represent Canada at the Olympics, but not at other international competitions after U.S. Figure Skating granted her a release.)

“I think I’ve lasted a lot longer than anybody thought I could — even now,” Stellato-Dudek said.

How prophetic it seems that her mother, Ann, told me in an interview for a 2000 Chicago Tribune story, “Deanna is a worker, not a child prodigy.”

Among all the unlikely parts of this tale, Stellato-Dudek’s age has attracted the most attention. The subject has become amusing to her, so much so that when Canadian figure skating press officer Karine Bedard tells Stellato-Dudek about an interview request, she will answer lightheartedly, “What do they want to interview me about? Skating while old?”

The truth is Stellato-Dudek has come to embrace such questions after a family member told her, “I think what you are doing is bigger than you.”

Stellato-Dudek began to gain that perspective in reading the hundreds of messages she said she has received from people who say they have been encouraged by her comeback to return to something they also loved.

“They will say, ‘I’ve always wanted to go back, but I’ve been too busy or too afraid to kind of step foot back in the rink, but I know that you started from somewhere so I can start from somewhere, too,’” Stellato-Dudek said. “And I thought maybe what I’m doing has a bigger meaning than even just what I’m doing for myself. It takes myself out of it a little bit and brings it back to something even bigger than just my personal goals.”

A similar desire to keep doing something he loved – and the dream of getting to the Olympics – is what led Deschamps to continue skating when progress was elusive and push came to shove, forcing him to interrupt his studies for a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology after two years because he couldn’t afford both the sport and school.

When asked to give more than 100 percent this season, which is impossible physically, he found the extra contribution by remaining upbeat as his partner struggled to train.

“It was mostly the mental part, (giving extra) to keep it positive because it was way harder (without) the physical capacity for the things,” Deschamps said. “And that’s how we were able to keep going.”

The interruptions caused by the pandemic mean that their four years together have included just two full competitive seasons. That has dramatically reduced the time each has had to learn the nuances of a new partner – and for Stellato-Dudek to master different techniques she has learned in Canada, like her hand placement on throws, in which she used to place both hands on her right shoulder but now has her left arm wrapped around the front of her body and the right arm around the back.

“There was a lot I had to do control-alt-delete and restart for,” she said.

“(Our skating) has just been evolving and evolving,” Deschamps said. “And we’re just trying to push our limits every single time, trying new elements, trying to even improve the sport by doing new stuff.”

One such element is the forward outside death spiral, hardest of the four types of death spirals (with the highest base value.) According to skatingscores.com, only 11 pair teams have done it internationally over the 19 seasons of the current judging system, including two Olympic champions: Chinese pairs Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo and Sui Wenjing and Han Cong. Only one other team, Alisa Efimova and Ruben Blommaert of Germany, has done it internationally this season.

In the absence of the long-dominant Russian pairs, barred from international competition since their country’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine 13 months ago, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps have the fourth-best score this season of the 23 teams in the world championships field.

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From last season to now, their personal bests in the short program, free skate and total have improved by 28 percent, 12 percent, and 16 percent, respectively. They have won medals at four of their five international events this season, finishing fourth at the Grand Prix Final, when Stellato-Dudek began to feel the effects of the virus.

“We always believed that (the success) was a possibility, but this season has surprised both of us,” she said. “When it began, we were getting a lot of positive feedback from everyone who had seen us, but you know, you don’t really believe that until you go to an event, and you get a new high score you’ve never received before.”

The high international scores and medals would send them to the Canadian Championships in the unexpected and potentially discomfiting position of being heavy favorites. They overcame the psychological and physical burdens to win the national title, a crowning achievement for many elite skaters.

“That was a brand-new place for us to be,” Stellato-Dudek said. “We’ve never been chased. We’ve always been chasing.

“We’re gaining a lot of very valuable experience. Because it’s a very new place to be mentally.”

It’s the place she always wanted to be. And there, truth be told, you have the plot of a neverending story that is no longer a fantasy.

Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCSports.com.

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Kanak Jha, U.S.’ top table tennis player, banned for missed drug tests

By OlympicTalkMar 20, 2023, 2:50 PM EDT

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Kanak Jha, the U.S.’ highest-ranked singles table tennis player, was given a backdated one-year ban for missing drug tests.

Jha, No. 23 in the world, was banned for missing three drug tests last year: March 18, June 2 and Sept. 4.

Athletes in Olympic sports face bans if they miss three drug tests in a 12-month span.

Jha, a two-time Olympian who has never tested positive for a banned substance, was given a reduced ban of one year, backdated to last Dec. 1, the date his provisional suspension was imposed.

First-time bans for missed drug tests can be as long as two years, but Jha was deemed by an arbitrator to have a light amount of fault and wasn’t trying to evade testing.

Jha disputed his third missed test, hoping it would be thrown out to avoid a ban.

During his one-hour testing window on Sept. 4, he was not present at the German address he listed on his doping-control forms, though he was at a nearby address.

The drug tester attempted to call Jha before his one-hour testing window was up, but the call did not go through as the tester did not dial the “+1” country code for a U.S. phone. Jha did not include the country code on his contact information and testified that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency never informed that he had to list a country code.

However, drug testers are not required to call athletes who do not answer their doors for random, out-of-competition tests.

Jha, who in 2016 became the first American born in the 2000s to qualify for an Olympics, lost his opening match in singles at the Rio and Tokyo Games.

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