Breaking
For nearly a decade, Victor Montalvo has held rank as one of the best competitive breakers in the world, but his B-Boy origin story traces back even further—to before his very existence.
The story of how Victor Montalvo became one of the greatest B-Boys of his generation doesn’t start with the moment when he discovered the art form at 6 years old. Nor does it open a decade and a half ago, when he began appearing at cyphers in Central Florida, displaying such precocity that the unknown teen was swiftly anointed a savior of American breaking. In actuality, the tale of how B-Boy Victor became an international champion—and one of the United States’ best hopes to win the gold medal in breaking at the 2024 Paris Olympics—begins in the projects of Puebla, Mexico, more than a decade before he was born.
“My dad always told me that ‘whatever you do, give it 100 percent and be the best at it. Even if you’re a janitor, just be the best janitor,’ ” says B-Boy Victor, referring to the mentality that really sparked his success. After a long day of practice in August, he’s currently lounging on a couch in his graffiti-covered practice space in West Los Angeles, where he relocated a couple of years ago to pursue opportunities in the entertainment industry. “My dad would always tell how he wanted to become a champion in breaking, but he was never able to.”
Rewind to the fall of 1983. In an indigent district far from the Zócalo, where factory workers paid a portion of their salary to live in tiny, rundown, corporate-owned houses, the Bermudez twins discovered what was then known as breakdancing—the fledgling art form that emerged from the South Bronx of the mid-1970s.
At the time, the five boroughs of New York City might as well have been a solar system apart from Puebla, a subtropical highland metropolis located about 80 miles southeast of Mexico City, known for its mole and UNESCO-protected architectural heritage. But even though hip-hop still remained largely unknown in large swaths of the nation that invented it, Victor and Hector Bermudez—the father and uncle of the future B-Boy Victor—learned about breaking through a visitor from the United States. On a trip back to his homeland, a friend’s cousin had brought a Betamax player to the brothers’ neighborhood, along with a homemade breaking documentary that revealed the windmills, headspins and downrocks first popularized by the Rock Steady Crew. Inspired by the creativity of it all, the Bermudez twins rewound the tape endlessly, attempting to master the moves that they saw.
Then in the summer of 1984, everything exploded. The seminal dance films Breakin’ and Beat Street became international sensations, introducing adolescents around the globe to a phenomenon that had almost exclusively been concentrated on the Eastern Seaboard and in Los Angeles. But the 13-year-old Bermudez brothers had gotten a head start.
“When we went to the movies to watch those films, there were guys trying to break outside of the theater,” remembers Victor Bermudez. “But because we’d watched the documentary beforehand, we had more experience and knowledge. When we started dancing, everyone went crazy for us.”
As the trend took root in Mexico, the Bermudez brothers and their friends formed a breaking crew that swiftly became known as the area’s finest. In particular, the twins were known for their dazzling power moves. Over the next 18 months, they participated in big competitions across the state of Puebla. There was no prize money, but they’d receive food, transportation and occasionally a hotel—a massive deal to kids barely into their teens, who had never left their neighborhood and dreamed of dance stardom.
But by 1986, the first breaking boom died out; the Bermudez twins switched their energies to playing guitar and drums in a death metal band. But music didn’t pay the bills either. In the hopes of escaping the region’s crushing poverty, the siblings joined a street gang.
“We were getting into trouble . . . doing bad things. My mom told me that I was either going to die or end up in jail,” Victor Bermudez remembers. “She told me that I needed to come with them to the United States. I told my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
Arriving in the U.S. required a harrowing journey across the Chihuahuan Desert, often without enough food or water. After the border crossing the family was picked up and crammed 20-deep into a van, then transported to a different, unfamiliar outpost. Their odyssey ended in Kissimmee, Florida, a predominantly Puerto Rican city in the outer suburbs of Orlando, where the family eventually settled. By 1994, the year of B-Boy Victor’s birth, his father and uncle had found employment working as chefs in a restaurant at nearby Walt Disney World.
The notion of winning fame and riches through dancing became a distant memory. In their new country, the Bermudez brothers dedicated themselves to work and supporting growing families. But they never entirely forgot their childhood passion.
Sometime around the turn of the century, the family was watching Beat Street in their living room when the famous battle scene between the New York City Breakers and the Bronx Rockers at the Roxy came on the screen. Hector and Victor told their children about how once upon a time they used to do those moves back home in Puebla. The 6-year-old Victor and his older cousin began cracking up with laughter. Never ones to back down from a challenge, the Bermudez twins rifled through their closets, busted out their old hoodies and began doing windmills, backspins and pops. The children were blown away and demanded that their parents teach them the routines.
But after a brief infatuation, B-Boy Victor and his cousin, Hector “Static” Bermudez, quit B-Boying for four years. When they eventually started back up again, there was no half-stepping. Obsessed with the dance, they practiced daily and formed a crew from around the neighborhood. None of them had any clue about the burgeoning domestic and international breaking scene. After all, this was the mid-2000s. The underground, back-to-basics traditionalism of the late 1990s was already out of vogue. 50 Cent and pop-rap crossovers controlled the Billboard charts. To most high school kids in Central Florida, breaking seemed as anachronistic as a manual typewriter.
“We thought we were the only breakers in the world,” B-Boy Victor remembers. “We weren’t looking at YouTube; we didn’t even know what YouTube was. We didn’t have a computer and I didn’t have a phone until I was 18 years old. All we had was old videocassettes of some people on MTV doing headspins. We would just try to copy them.”
Wearing a navy-blue hoodie, track pants and sneakers, the 28-year-old with closely cropped black hair and forearm tattoos looks like an archetypal B-Boy—albeit one with the aesthetic appeal of a pop star.
After our interview on this broiling August afternoon, B-Boy Victor—who is most commonly known by the mononym Victor—will head to Santa Monica to play beach volleyball with some friends. For the last several hours he’s been practicing his generationally renowned power moves in preparation for this November’s Red Bull BC One World Final in New York, where he’ll represent the United States as a wild-card entry.
To watch Victor break is to wrongfully assume that he emerged straight from the womb with a staggering array of lightning backspins, airflares and windmills—as though he long ago struck a Mephistophelian pact to forever defy gravity. But while he was genetically gifted with natural athleticism, agility and flexibility, his path to stardom required years of rigorous practice alongside his brother and cousin. There was no fancy studio to nurture their talent. Instead, the crew practiced on the carpet with cardboard on top, or on the concrete with a mat placed down for protection.
“I’d be practicing in my room and see him walking by, peeking through the door to see what I was doing,” his cousin Static says. “I’d be like, ‘Do you want to come in and learn?’ And that’s when we really started training. We would practice every single day and night—to the point where my father and uncle would be like, ‘OK, it’s time to go sleep!’ ”
For the next three years, the pair tirelessly refined their moves alongside a squad of about a half dozen. Without any contact with the outside breaking world, they developed their own original style, unaffected by contemporary trends. Finally, someone in the crew heard about a breaking jam in Kissimmee. When they showed up, they seemed like the survivors on Lost, finally making it off the island.
“It was crazy because no one knew about us,” Static says. “They were like, ‘Who the heck are these kids?’ People thought we were from out of town.”
At just 14, Victor finished in the top 16. At the next tournament in Gainesville, Florida, their crew took home the grand prize. From there, it was on—except when it wasn’t. The road to the international circuit was paved with numerous losses. Even the most dominant B-Boys will fail more than they succeed. This forces a necessary mental fortitude: It’s not about the defeat, but rather how you bounce back.
“I loved losing because it pushed me to do more,” Victor recalls. “I remember training hard, going to all these events and not placing and I’m like, ‘Ugh, I gotta go back and train harder.’ Then I’d go into another event and place but lose. I’d be like, ‘I gotta get better.’ The more I started losing, the better I started getting.”
Victor inherited his ferocious determination from his father, whose own hardships taught him the importance of strength, discipline and a will for greatness. The elder Victor remembers this era vividly, specifically a time when his son came to him in tears. Then 15, the future champion was devastated after a near-victory in a regional battle.
“I told him he needed to learn from it. If you lost, you did something wrong— not in a bad way, but in a way where you need to fix it so you can win the next time,” Victor Bermudez says. “I knew he was good, but I always taught him the importance of being the best at whatever he wanted to do. If he wanted to be a dishwasher or a chef, I wanted him to be the best at it.”
By the end of the 2000s, B-Boy Victor and his crew, Flip Style, acquired DVDs of Red Bull BC One competitions—and discovered the global breaking galaxy. The dawn of YouTube offered access to clips of international events, which spurred his stylistic evolution and desire to break on a larger stage. His first major victory occurred at the 2011 Red Bull BC One cypher in Tampa, which qualified him for the national finals in Chicago. Until that point, he’d never left Florida.
“Everyone was like, ‘Who’s this kid? He’s gonna lose first round,’ ” says Victor, who competed in Chicago as “Vicious Victor.” “I was the underdog. No one believed that I was gonna make it past the first round. Like, ‘This kid’s gonna lose, easy.’ ”
But only a few months after his 17th birthday, Victor nearly earned the top prize, ultimately losing to B-Boy El Niño in the final round. It was a “star is born” moment that won him invitations from all the elite tournaments around the world—the first being the Notorious IBE competition held each fall in the Netherlands. He’d dreamed of this moment for years, but two problems stood in his way: his lack of a passport and his senior year of high school.
“My mom and her brothers and sisters were like, ‘Don’t let him go. He’s not going!’ Even my older brother was like, ‘He has to stay in school!’ ” Victor says. “I begged my mom every day, but my dad wanted me to go. He was like, ‘Shut up. Don’t tell her nothing—you’re going.’ ”
Even though he was short on money for rent, Victor’s father paid more than $500 to get a rushed passport for his son, determined for his child to realize the dreams that he’d never had the chance to fulfill. The Netherlands trip was followed by an invitation to the Battle of the Year in France. Victor soon fell behind in school, dropped out and moved to England for the next three months.
“My mom and her side of the family were really upset,” Victor says. “They thought it was horrible—that I was going to be a nobody—that I needed to go back to school to have a career. But my dad was OK with it. He was like, ‘All right, just follow your dreams. Do what you’re doing.’ He was the only one who truly believed in me.”
After several years of placing high in tournaments but rarely winning, Victor’s breakthrough arrived in 2014. He won a battle in France and another in Taiwan. By now a member of the vaunted crew The Squadron, Victor still suffered plenty of losses, but his hard work and raw talent allowed him to take the art form to the next level. No one before him had blended such blindingly fast and agile power moves with such preternatural confidence and a rhythmic communion with the music. With his athleticism and sense of improvisation, he brought forth the next evolution of routines without sacrificing the traditionalist fundamentals of the greats who stood before him.
It all led up to 2015, when Victor won the Red Bull BC One World Final championship in Rome, the Silverback Open championship in Philadelphia and the Undisputed World B-Boy Series in France (which he also won in 2017). It began a run matched by few B-Boys in modern competitive history. He’s won too many battles to list in full, but a few of his most notable victories over the last half-decade include Outbreak Europe in Slovakia (2017, 2019), the World Urban Games in Hungary (2019) and last year’s WDSF World Breaking Championships in Paris.
Despite the success, those around him describe a modest, tenacious and kind person, so dedicated to his family that he recently bought them a house in Kissimmee with his earnings.
“He’s really humble and hard working,” says his wife, Kateryna Pavlenko, herself a celebrated dancer known as B-Girl Kate. “It feels like he was born under a lucky star. His hard work takes him wherever he wants. He has a really good heart, passion and patience. It just accumulates and allows him to keep getting better at whatever it is that he wants to do.”
But over the past three years, there was a period where Victor fell out of love with the sport. The problem with being at the top is that it requires a tremendous amount of effort to remain there—not to mention the pressure that accompanies it. You can practice all day, but it often starts to feel rote, as though you’re going through the motions. By the beginning of 2020, Victor understood that it was time to take a break, which soon became a forced hiatus due to the pandemic.
“I just lost the love of it,” Victor says. “I was like, ‘Man, I gotta stay away from breaking.’ Maybe it was the events, maybe it was the music, but it didn’t feel the same.”
In 2020, he returned to Florida for six months to regroup with his family. When the international borders reopened, he and Pavlenko headed to her native Ukraine. During his B-Boy sabbatical, Victor took up Muay Thai fighting, bike riding and running. Since returning to competition, he’s continued to rack up victory after victory, most recently in July, taking the breaking gold medal at the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Alabama.
“He’s probably the most dominant B-Boy of all-time in terms of competitive breaking,” says Ivan “Roxrite” Delgado, a legendary breaker in his own right and a fellow member of The Squadron. “He takes what has already been done to new levels and at the same time adds his own twist. He has already won three of the biggest events that the Olympic Federation has hosted. His chances of winning the gold medal in 2024 are very high.”
Winning Olympic gold in breaking might be Victor’s preeminent and most immediate goal, but it’s certainly not the only one. He projects a quiet and low-key temperament, but beneath the surface, he’s brimming with aspirations for the future. He wants to raise a family, invest in real estate and operate a business—ideally, a training gym for breakers and other athletes, perhaps with a café that offers the healthy food options that Kissimmee currently lacks.
Of course, bringing home the first-ever Olympic gold medal in breaking would create massive opportunities and potentially make Victor the face of the sport, both nationally and internationally. But in line with his sense of tradition, he deflects discussion of the personal gains it may offer—instead speaking to the broader opportunities that it would afford the art form and the community.
“We’re going to get more respect out of it,” Victor says. “There are two sides to breaking: the battling side and the culture side. I want people to know about the culture as well, because the competition side can get boring if you watch breakers and don’t understand what they’re doing. I want people to see both sides.”
This deeper awareness of its cultural roots could only come from someone who has been steeped in it since childhood, or in this case, even before he came into consciousness. The Olympics offer a chance to realize a dream that spans generations—the father who never had the opportunity to watch his talent fully bloom, who sacrificed everything to ensure that his son could be the greatest in the world. A victory in Paris would go much deeper than acclaim, wealth or fame. It would be a culmination of a hope that began four decades ago.
“I didn’t have a chance to do it, so it means everything to watch my son live his dreams. And through him, I can live my own dreams,” says his father, Victor Bermudez. “I always wanted to be the best but couldn’t because I had my kids and was young and had to work. When he travels abroad and I see the pictures or he calls me on a video call, I can see everything through him. Everything I wanted to do, he’s doing now.”