SEOUL: South Korean Kim Hong-Yeol, a.k.a. Hong10, trumped reigning champion Mounir from France to take the Red Bull world breakdancing crown before a rapturous home crowd in Seoul on Saturday.
The 28-year-old snatched the title in a final dance-off against the 2012 winner, after 14 other contenders for the global b-boy championship had been eliminated.
“I’m speechless. All my effort and hard practice have finally paid off,” a tired but ecstatic Hong10, who won the title in 2006, said after his victory.
Sixteen b-boys from 10 nations including the United States, Brazil, France and Japan battled it out on the dance floor in front of a sell out crowd in the South Korean capital’s Jamsil Stadium.
Eight past winners and two wild card entrants competed with six dancers who had qualified through regional tournaments that covered some 90 countries.
B-boying, or breakdancing, originated in New York in the 1970s and then spread across the globe, gaining a devoted following in several Asian countries.
It is so popular in South Korea, that the government promotes the dance style as one of its cultural exports. Top Seoul b-boy groups like R16 and Maximum Crew have won a number of global competitions.
The Red Bull championship is one of the few individual, one-on-one contests and the 3,500-strong audience at the Jamsil arena entered enthusiastically into the gladiatorial spirit of the knockout format.
In each round of the whirlwind two-hour event, two dancers faced off on an open stage in the center of the arena, taking turns to show off their skills to hip-hop beats.
The crowd cheered, jeered and roared as the dancers taunted each other, circling their opponents and then performing their spins, twists and aerial moves so close as to make the other dancer flinch or step back.
Five judges made of prominent breakdancers raised a paper board with the winner’s name after each round, which lasted about three to four minutes.
The dancers were judged on the creativity and extremity of their dance routines as well as their attitude and showmanship during the dance-off.
The Red Bull BC One championship was launched in 2004 and the finals have been held in cities ranging from Johannesburg to Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro.
South Korean clinches world breakdance title
South Korean clinches world breakdance title
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
