Breaking: it’s breaking. The Olympics’ latest summer sport had its gala opening at the pop-up stadium in Place de la Concorde on Friday, where the grand marble statues of the great ladies of France looked down as the DJ dropped the opening notes of Tom Zé’s 1972 hit Dor e Dor, and two young B-Girls, India, 18, from the Netherlands, and Talash, 21, from Afghanistan, took to the stage for the very first battle of the breaking competition. If you hadn’t already guessed that the International Olympic Committee isn’t in Kansas any more, let alone Lausanne, there was a clue coming right up in the opening moments.
Talash, who was born in Kabul but now lives in Madrid, and who was competing for the IOC’s refugee team, ripped off her top midway through the opening battle to reveal a brilliant blue cape with “Free Afghan Women” written in bright white letters across the back. The IOC have banned all athletes from making political statements, and watching Talash spin and pirouette in her cape, it was just about possible to imagine IOC President Thomas Bach doing a spit-take as he looked up from his cup of coffee in the VIP suite. Talash didn’t make it through to the round-robin stage, but she had already said and done plenty for her sport in that one viral moment.
There was another viral moment a little later in the competition, when Raygun, a 35-year-old university lecturer from Australia, turned in a memorable performance which involved, among other things, an impression of a kangaroo and another of what seemed to be dying fish. It didn’t help Raygun any that while everyone else was wearing street clothes, she had come dressed in a Team Australia tracksuit that made her look like the first reserve for the rowing eight.
Still, as Raygun wrote herself after it was all over: “Don’t be afraid to be different, go out there and represent yourself.” Breaking is joyful, athletic, exuberant, entertaining, and expressive. None of which means it should necessarily be an Olympic sport. They have been holding global competitions since the early 1990s, but it was all pretty loose, and the organisers had to do a lot of work to get it into shape for the Games. The IOC asked the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF), who are best known for organising ballroom dancing competitions, to take charge even though they had no prior relationship with the breaking community. Which is why the WDSF were initially convinced that Olympic breaking ought to be scored on points, like artistic gymnastics.
Which really isn’t how it works. Breaking is best understood as an argument between the two dancers, who are taking turns to respond to each other’s moves. It’s not about how well you perform a particular trick, but how much better your routine is than the person you’re battling with. So the WDSF eventually came up with a comparative scoring system in which nine judges grade the two dancers in each battle on sliding scales across five measures. The dancers, who have no idea what they’re going to be dancing to, compete one-on-one across three-rounds.
Other Olympic sports are trying to move away from subjective scoring because it’s so opaque, and it was undeniably hard to parse who had won and why on the first day of the breaking. But it really can’t be any other way. “Train like an athlete and dance like an artist,” says Portuguese B-Girl Vanessa “It’s a competition, but above all, it’s an art. It’s important to maintain this balance because we express ourselves through our bodies, just like a painter with a canvas.”
Apart from Vanessa, Talash, and India, the cast included Ayumi, a 41-year-old nursery school teacher from Japan, Syssy, a 16-year-old French schoolgirl, Raygun, a 35-year-old university lecturer from Australia, and Sunny, a 35-year-old New Yorker who quit her job as a marketing executive at Estée Lauder to do this professionally. And if you’re sceptical about the wisdom of her decision, go look up the five-minute clip of her spectacular battle against the Chinese B-Girl 671, which was as thrilling and dexterous as anything the gymnasts have been doing over at Bercy Arena.
Breaking is more of a party than a sport, but the music was great, the stands were full, and the media section was overflowing. There was even a queue outside the Olympic Family stand for the Games’ assorted dignitaries, which is usually half-empty at every other venue. Even Snoop Dogg tuned up to do the ceremonial opening. Everyone wanted to be a part of it.
Which is why it’s so odd that the sport has already been dropped from the roster of events for the next Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, as if it had been found wanting before it had even made its debut. The LA organising committee preferred to pick cricket, baseball and flag football, among other things. Which is a shame. The Olympics ought to belong to everyone, and breaking represents a culture, and serves a community, who have had very little reason to turn on, tune in, or take part, until now. Most of the dancers here didn’t even dream of being Olympians because it never even occurred to them that it would be a possibility.
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And besides all that, it plays a lot better than sprint canoeing on TikTok.
Even so, its first Games may yet end up its last, which would be oddly fitting in a city that previously held the Olympics’ only ever contests in live pigeon-shooting, hot-air ballooning, and musical composition. This last competition was judged by a formidable panel of Bela Bartok, Gabriel Faure, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Arthur Honegger, who eventually decided that none of the works entered were “worthy of a prize”. The judging panel for the breaking had no such qualms. The Olympics’ first-ever breaking medal was the bronze awarded to 671. The silver went to Nicka, a 17-year-old Lithuanian who learned the sport from YouTube, and the gold to Ami, from Japan.