Breaking debuts as an official Olympic sport Aug. 9 at the 2024 Paris Games. But it’s not the first time break dancing has been showcased on the Olympic stage — that would be Aug. 12, 1984 at the Summer Olympics closing ceremony at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The nationally-telecast affair featured the usual pomp and circumstance: a Parade of Nations, renditions of national anthems spanning Greece, the United States, and South Korea, speeches, and fireworks displays. A UFO even made an appearance, floating high above the Coliseum.
But then, singer Lionel Richie, dressed in a blue sequined jacket and white pants, emerged from the pyrotechnic smoke to perform an extended rendition of his 1983 hit “All Night Long.” With him: hundreds of break dancers representing different crews from the streets of Los Angeles.
Among them were the Majestic Visual Break Dancers, a crew associated with what was then-known as the Watts/Willowbrook Boys Club, whose Olympic ceremony breakers included a young Cuba Gooding Jr.
In true ‘80s fashion, dancers were decked out in jumpsuits, sneakers, sweatbands, legwarmers, baseball caps, and even bucket hats. But what they offered — athletic, high-energy feats of strength consisting of spins, handstands, windmills, flares, and more — was relatively new.
In 1984, break dancing was still considered fringe — a street dance style and radical expression of the hip-hop underground that originated in the Bronx years before. By then, it had crossed over to the West Coast, but was still considered radical. Business owners in Westwood were still calling the cops on dancers and their spectators, who then were cited for breaking the city’s anti-loitering laws. But at the closing ceremony, the dance was on full display for billions of viewers watching at home and recording on their VCRs.
Damita Jo Freeman (2nd to the left) and Lionel Richie (3rd to the left) chat with dancers. Photo courtesy of Sergio Segura.
So how did breaking make the jump from the streets to the Olympic stage?
Dancer and choreographer Damita Jo Freeman is best-known for her time on the dance sensation TV show Soul Train and her influence in the LA dancing scene. Alongside Don "Campbellock" Campbell, she popularized now-famous moves like the Slauson Shuffle. Freeman, who worked with Richie at the time, choreographed the 1984 Olympic closing ceremony. She says the decision came down to a desire to show off to the world what all-American dancers had to offer.
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“They're breaking. They're popping. They're locking. Let's show the world that,” recalls Freeman, who danced alongside the breakers at the ceremony clad in a bright red dress.
For a month leading up to the ceremony, Freeman led a motley crew of dancers — Crips, Bloods, little kids, big kids, modern dance kids, as she tells it — for daily rehearsals at a local high school, all expected to arrive at 6 a.m. sharp.
“These young kids, I wasn't looking at the color. It wasn't Black. It wasn't white. It wasn’t Hispanic. It was just the love of all the kids and their type of dancing,” she says.
A member of the EZ Rockers with Damita Jo Freeman during rehearsals. Photo courtesy of Sergio Segura.
Sergio Segura was one of those kids. The Santa Ana native began breaking in high school, after catching early music videos showcasing the dance. He fell in love with the form, stunned by how dancers could contort their bodies and pop, lock, and move with ease. What came next, he says, felt natural and felt good.
“I was in the best shape of my life. Those were some great workouts. You really had to be mentally and physically strong to do that stuff,” Segura says. “You would just take it to the floor.”
He began running with a crew called the EZ Rockers and they battled other crews wherever they could: house parties, skating rinks, the mall, even the beach.
“I remember going to the beach, battling out there on the damn cement,” he says. “We were running into different B-boy crews. That's just how it was.”
In 1984, just weeks after graduating from high school, Segura caught wind of breaking tryouts for the closing ceremony. He and his EZ Rockers won round after round of competitions. Ultimately, they made the cut.
Sergio Segura (top) pictured with his crew called the EZ Rockers. Photo courtesy of Sergio Segura.
“You're like, ‘What am I doing here? Wow. We're at the LA Coliseum, where I used to watch my Raiders,’” Segura recalls. “I didn’t even really think about how big it was. We just did it. I’m sure I was nervous, but just getting out there was insane.”
Segura, now 58, has long retired from his breaking days. But he’s never forgotten that midsummer Olympic night.
“Every Olympics, I bring it up,” he laughs. “‘I was in the ‘84 Olympics.’ They're like, ‘What?’ I was in the Olympics — closing ceremony — but I was in it.”
Lionel Richie behind the scenes at the 1984 Summer Olympics. Photo courtesy of Sergio Segura.
Forty years later, Freeman is just surprised that breaking didn’t become an Olympic sport sooner.
“I thought in my head that it would be in the gymnastic part, because breaking to me was like a gymnastic — the way they did all these different moves on the floor, one-handed,” she says.
She continues, “But time went by and time never looked back until now. In one way, I am happy that they are establishing it, but I'm still unhappy that it took this long, because that's almost 40 years.”
A member of the EZ Rockers with Damita Jo Freeman during rehearsals. Photo courtesy of Sergio Segura.
This weekend in Paris, the dance form born from the streets of the Bronx will be repped by competitors from 16 countries, several of which have hosted long-standing, international breaking competitions like Battle of the Year and Red Bull’s BC One. A far cry from its loitering days, break dancing is now accepted — and respected — enough that classes can be found from fitness studios to the collegiate level, in some cases taught by the OGs themselves. That includes LA native Don Sevilla, who remembers the fateful 1982 day when he saw the arm wave move — or “pop” — that determined his fate.
“It looked like magic to me,” Sevilla recalls.
A shy and awkward kid, by his own admission, Sevilla practiced breaking moves in front of his bathroom mirror, slowly gaining the confidence to make himself, and his skills, known. He joined his junior high peers as they showed off their breaking, popping, locking and competed against one another for the ultimate goal: respect.
“One day, and this is circa 1983, I got a knock on my door, and it was a group of these kids that said, ‘I heard you could pop. I want to pop against you.’ I walked outside my house, someone brought a boombox, played some electro-funk, and we had a battle right there in front of my house.”
He continues, “We had an exchange of dance moves and at the end of that battle, his friends — the person who challenged me — his crew, said, ‘Man, Don beat you.’And he came up to me and he held his hand out, he said, ‘Respect. Good battle. You should join my crew.’ And I said, ‘You know what? You should join mine.’”
Today, Sevilla teaches hip hop dance choreography and breaking at Pomona College and Claremont McKenna College. He’s in disbelief to see his childhood hobby and currency of his youth street cred codified as a formal sport on the international stage.
“It's really an honor to have been a part of it and to see it at this level now,” Sevilla says. “It's amazing the evolution of the moves. These are moves that, as a kid, I couldn't even imagine doing. These are like fantasy moves.”
While breaking is not currently on the program for the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA, that won’t stop Sevilla and other Angelenos from tuning in Friday and Saturday to watch Team USA — including SoCal native B-girl Logan “Logistx” Edra — go for the first Olympic breaking gold.
“It makes me even more inspired just to keep it alive in my own life,” Sevilla says, “and to share it with young people coming up today.”
Correction: A previous version of this story referred to Sergio Segura’s breaking crew as the EZ Breakers; they were known as the EZ Rockers.