Your guide to breakdancing
It is a pastime we usually associate with New York in the 1980s, RUNDMC and that guy from accounts doing the worm after a few drinks at the work Christmas party.
But breakdancing is now not only a famous hip-hop dance style, it is a sport.
And not just any sport, it’s an Olympic sport – following a bold decision by the International Olympic Committee to have Bboys and Bgirls compete at the 2024 Paris Games.
How did a subculture dance style born on the streets make it all the way to the Five Ring circus? What are the attributes of the athletes involved? And, when it comes to deciding a gold medal, will it be a good old-fashioned dance-off?
What is breakdancing?
A small point of order to start – the correct term is ‘‘breaking’’ and, after an International Olympic Committee vote on December 7, there will be Olympic goldmedals in 2024 won by the world’s best breaking dancers, or as they’re known, Bboys (break boys) and Bgirls (break girls).
Breaking is comfortably the most unusual sport ever added to the Olympic Games programme.
The dance style was a child of the hip-hop subculture that emerged on the streets of the Bronx, in New York, in the early 1970s. DJS created a new music style where theywould loop (repeat) the ‘‘breaks’’ in popular disco and funk tracks, having figured out the most popular sections for dancers were the musical breaks between the verses. Rapperswould voice rhymes over the new tracks.
The drum-based music is perfect for breaking dance routines, which can combine fancy ‘‘toprock’’ footwork, leg and back spins, flares (legs swinging in a V formation around the body), freezes (suddenly becoming motionless in a balance position), power move handstands and acrobatic flips.
So how is it now an Olympic sport?
Over the past decade, the IOC began worrying the Olympics were being seen as boring, stuffy and irrelevant, particularly to young people. They began looking to modernise the Games and to make them more ‘‘urban’’, trading old-fashioned sporting events for things youngsters do in their spare time.
‘‘We want to take sport to the youth,’’ IOC boss Thomas Bach said in 2015.
‘‘With the many options that young people have, we cannot expect any more that they will come automatically to us. We have to go to them.’’
In 2016, the IOC announced an unprecedented shake-up, adding surfing, rock climbing, skateboarding and three-onthree basketball to the 2020 Olympics schedule in Tokyo. They also gave the Olympic host the ability to choose a sport they thoughtwouldwork in their Games.
Tokyo 2020 organisers chose baseball and softball and, after considering parkour (fast-paced running, jumping and climbing over buildings and city structures), Paris 2024 chose ... breaking. It will be staged on the famous square the Place de la Concorde, off the Avenue des Champs-elysees.
France is reportedly the second biggest hip-hop market in theworld, and in a pointer to why the IOC greenlit the addition of breaking, hip-hop is also growing at a rapid rate is China.
A reality TV rap programme in China in 2017 saw the Djing, rapping and breaking scene explode in popularity and a recent estimate counted the ‘‘street dance’’ community at more than 10 million.
How will breaking work at the Olympics? Good oldfashioned dance fights?
Precisely. The format for the 2024 Olympics hasn’t been revealed yet but it is almost certain to be based on dance battles.
That’s how it worked when breaking was a trial event at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, where Japan’s Ramu Kawai claimed gold in the girls’ event and Russian Sergei ‘‘Bumblebee’’ Chernyshevwon the boys’.
Competitors performed in ‘‘showcase’’ rounds before the best 32went to battle rounds. After a series of six turns each on the stage – over a battle lasting five to six minutes – a panel of judges assessed the combatants’ performance and chose winners. Finally, a knockout semifinals stage, and a gold medal battle, was held.
Critics argue free-spirit breakdancers can’t be judged against each other but Bobbito Garcia, one of original members of the Rock Steady Crew, said that couldn’t be further from the truth. Hip-hop has always been competitive.
‘‘Think about it like boxing,’’ Garcia told theundefeated.com. ‘‘You’re stepping into a ring. You’re about to battle another warrior. The mental fortitude required, coupled with the athleticism – hell, yeah, breaking is a sport!’’
How is breaking scored?
Like other dance sports – think, Strictly Ballroom – breaking is judged subjectively by a panel. Or, at least, it was in 2018, when an Olympic format and judging criteria had to be created from scratch.
From the array of accepted moves and styles that leading dancers already use, veteran breaking experts created a system that assessed three categories. The first was Body/ Physical, based on technique and variety. The second was Soul/interpretative quality, composed of performativity and musicality. The last was Mind/ Artistic quality, which assessed creativity and personality.