Editing Logan Edra (section)

===Preparation, Lifestyle Change of Olympic Breakers and Culture Change of Breaking===
The Dance Magazine brought a great cover story by Jennifer Heimlich - [https://www.dancemagazine.com/breaking-2024-olympics-paris/#gsc.tab=0 Breaking New Ground: For the First Time in History, Dancers Are Competing at the Olympics] - with some interesting insides. Some Quotes:

====Resources====
Despite any debates over authenticity, one thing is clear: The Olympics are creating a high-performance support system for top-ranking breakers. The highest scorers from qualifying competitions are now part of Team USA, and have been flown to the Olympic facility in Colorado Springs a handful of times for training camps. They’ve been given strength and conditioning coaches, sports psychologists, dietitians, and health-care coverage. Some have also received grants, like the one from the Women’s Sports Foundation that Chang has used to rent studio space so she doesn’t have to dance outside. “There’s a lot of different resources that we, as breakers, have never seen before,” says Louis. 

That said, because breaking is brand-new to the Olympics, the infrastructure and monetary support lags far behind more established sports like rowing or swimming. “They’re being treated like the world’s greatest athletes. We’re being treated more like very talented dancers. That’s the disconnect right now,” says Ivan “Flipz” Velez, who will be the judge representing North America in Paris. There’s reportedly been some scrambling involved as WDSF figures out the details of breaking becoming an Olympic sport. Dancers say they had to stay flexible and adapt quickly to changes as organizers decided exactly what the judging system would look like, how music would be handled, and what type of floor would be used. 

====Lifestyle Change====
Many of breaking’s Olympic hopefuls have already seen their lives change dramatically. Montalvo shares that he’s had a slew of press requests and has sponsorship deals from major brands like Red Bull, Delta, Comcast, Jack in the Box, and Athletic Brewing. “There’s a lot of media that wants to know what breaking is all about,” he says. “This has been the busiest year of my life.” 

Choi says that juggling appearances and events along with corporate partnerships and media interviews has actually made it tricky to prepare the way she wants to. “It’s been really amazing but also challenging, because I know I need to be focusing on training for the Olympics,” she says.

Even dancers who didn’t know whether they would qualify until June upended their lives for the possibility. Chang says she stopped working as a restoration ecologist to pursue breaking as a career. She now dances with her crew two to three hours a day, five days a week; cross-trains for an hour four days a week; does biweekly sessions with a sports therapist; and joins regional competitions for practice on some weekends. In addition to physical prep, Louis shares that he’s been studying his past competitions to analyze his strengths and weaknesses, dissecting videos of competitors, and watching footage from the 1980s to diversify his arsenal of movements.

====Culture Change====
Of course, some elements of a traditional battle have been tweaked in its translation for the Olympic stage. Most notable is the more regimented scoring. “In cultural breaking events, it’s based off of opinion—it’s super-subjective,” says Montalvo. But at Olympic competitions and qualifiers, there’s a structured points system. That rewards a slightly different strategy, Montalvo believes: “You have to be more explosive from beginning to end, getting straight to the point, doing big moves on the beat, ending off with a big freeze. And if you’re too complex, really being super-creative, I feel like you don’t get too far.” Because judges are ticking off particular boxes to tally the score, dancers need to be well-rounded, whereas, Louis says, in other competitions a breaker could just do one thing really well and win with that. 

Po Chun Chen, aka “Bojin,” head of the breaking division of the World DanceSport Federation (the organization helping to oversee breaking at the Olympics), acknowledges that it’s been a challenge to balance the sport and the culture in a dance form started by oppressed people looking for a way to freely express themselves. “We cannot lose the original soul of breaking, which is the freedom,” he says. One way in which the WDSF is attempting to honor the hip-hop roots of breaking at the Olympics is by starting out the competition with the judges showing off their own skills in a cypher as a way of celebrating the culture. Though the practice would be unthinkable in figure skating or gymnastics, “this is our culture,” says Chen.