American breaker Sunny Choi quit her job as a marketing executive to headline the United States' first-ever Olympic breaking team. But now she'll leave Paris empty-handed after being eliminated from quarterfinal contention even before her third battle.
Choi finished her Olympic run with a victory, defeating Portugal's Vanessa, 2-0, in the round-robin. But it wasn't enough to earn her a spot in the knockout stage. She ranked third in her respective group but needed a top-two finish.
Now, she will head home without any certainty of being able to compete in the Olympics again. It's an outcome Choi accepted when she stepped away from her job as director of global creative operations for skin care at Estée Lauder, the second-largest cosmetics company in the world, in January 2023.
"I literally worked my whole entire life to have that financial stability, and then to give it up for this dream that may or may not happen was really, really scary," Choi told reporters of her decision to quit her job for breaking. "Initially, I was just, 'I don't want to give up my current lifestyle.' I was comfortable. I could buy whatever I wanted. I shopped at Whole Foods."
And for Choi, there were greater sacrifices at stake than just the financial ones.
"As a breaker, I was just like, ‘I don’t see how this is going to be possible.' And then there are other factors. Like I want to have kids at some point, and I'm 35 now. So, it's like, ‘Am I willing to wait several more years?’" Choi said. "There was a lot of things I just wanted to check off, and the Olympics just threw my plans out the window."
It was a decision Choi said she had to think about an entire year before making the decision to quit her job in early 2023.
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Choi gave her employer a few months notice that she would be leaving, and her boss had no choice but to accept Choi's unexpected ambition.
"But it just kind of came down to, like, I just have to. I have to try. I have to stop stopping myself," Choi said. "My boss was like, ‘I really want you to stay, but I have no business asking you to stay given what you’re leaving for.'"
Quitting her job wasn't just a pivot to focus on Paris, but a pivot to a new career focused on dancing.
Choi said in April that once the Paris Games were over, her plan was to open her own dance studio in Queens, New York. She had no plans to return to marketing … unless she had to.
"If I do, it means something went wrong with the dancing career," Choi said when asked if she would ever return to a corporate job. "I do still plan to dance, but I really want to shift gears and give feedback and teach the next generation the things that I've learned along the journey."
A medal in Paris may have gone a long way in helping her achieve that goal and keep her dancing career lucrative. Choi admits that, unlike a corporate salary, making money off her sport depends so much on the visibility of her own personal brand. She learned that the hard way training for Paris.
Choi said she had money set aside while working her marketing job to finance her Olympic ambitions and maintaining a consistent lifestyle. She said she had enough to carry her through all of 2023 when she quit her job. She had to pay for all of her own flights for competitions and said she was able to save money by training at public community centers.
But she says she did come to a point where she was running out of money and had to consider making lifestyle sacrifices. Fortunately for her, around that time, she was able to secure a sponsorship with Nike and Samsung to finance her dream.
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While she won't leave Paris with the publicity of making the medal podium, she still has business skills and experience from her corporate career to lean on for her future endeavors.
"I myself am just lucky that I did work in corporate, and I do have background knowledge in marketing, project management and operations, so that will help me in the long run," Choi said.
It will be a while before Choi gets another chance at an Olympic medal, if at all. The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics won't include breaking as a sport, but Choi says she has her fingers crossed that it will make its return at the 2032 Brisbane summer Games. She will be 43 then.
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