A former women's footballer who fell in love with dancing has the opportunity to become an Olympic Games gold medallist when the sport makes its debut at Paris 2024.
Emma Houston, who has the nickname ‘Shortbread’, is one of the few athletes highlighted by the sport's new governing body, Breaking GB, as having medal potential when the sport makes its Olympic debut. Houston played junior football for Falkirk Ladies but fell out of love with the game.
“I was struggling a bit with football, I was very light and small and it was becoming harder to out-muscle the bigger players, and I was becoming much more prone to being injured,” Houston told the PA news agency.
“Simultaneously I discovered dance and the breadth of opportunities within it, and I found I was able to explore moving my body in different ways.
“It was a tough choice to let football go, but I was swept away with dance and all the things I could discover within it. I discovered it all on my own, this whole underground culture, and I quite liked that I’d found something that was mine.”
Houston studied contemporary dance in Dundee and then the Royal Academy of Dance in London. She is now a Great Britain breakdancing medal hopeful for Paris.
The inclusion of breakdancing at the Olympics has resulted in Breaking GB being awarded £135,000 in funding from UK Sport, which was announced ahead of this weekend’s European Breakdancing Championships in Manchester.
Breakdancing sees dancers compete in head-to-head ‘throw downs’, with the winners determined by judges who score athletes based on technique, performativity and creativity.
Having breakdancing included in the Olympic Games is a dream come true for Houston who grew up watching athletics.
“As a kid I was obsessed with watching the Olympics,” Houston added.
“I love watching the 100-metre sprints and the long and high jumps. It’s been really cool to connect the dots, from watching it and thinking it would be cool to be involved, to having the possibility of doing something really historical as one of the first breakdancers to go to the Games.”
