What is breaking and how does it work at the Olympics?
The first rule of breaking is: you do not talk about breakdancing.
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- Alex Dakers
Each new instalment of the Olympics brings with it the opportunity to refresh the line-up of sports that will be included across the two weeks of competition that year. Doing so is an effort by the International Olympic Committee to modernise the Games, attract new and younger audiences and give athletes from smaller or emerging sports to showcase their talent to the world. At Paris 2024, the sole debutant is known by a somewhat obscure name: breaking.
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With roots in 1970s New York, breaking joins several other urban sports in Paris, including skateboarding and BMX freestyle, but you may well be wondering what the Olympics’ newest sport actually involves. So here's an RT crash course in the discipline, from rules and point-scoring to terms like B-boy and toprock…
So, what is breaking?
Breaking is a style of street dance that originated in 1970s New York. The sport can be traced back to the New York borough of the Bronx in the early 70s, where the dance style began to grow at block parties in tandem with the increasing popularity of hip-hop music. The "break" is the part of a song where vocals and other instruments fade out, leaving just the percussion – and it was in that break that early b-boys and b-girls (male and female competitors who practice the sport of breaking) began to showcase their acrobatic moves and quick footwork set to the backing of the hip-hop soundtrack. As breaking's popularity spread, more communities and cultures got involved, forming crews to face off in both individual and team dance battles and leading to the first international breaking competitions starting up in the 1990s. The word "breakdancing" was used by the media and is rejected by those within the sport.
Breaking first featured at an Olympic event in 2018 when it was included at the Summer Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was its success there that led to its inclusion at Paris 2024.
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What are the rules and how is it judged?
In Paris, the breaking competition is split into a men’s event and a women’s event. The competition will see 16 b-boys and 16 b-girls face off in one-on-one battles consisting of three 60-second throw downs (the term for when a b-boy or b-girl hits the floor and starts breaking), where they must adapt their style and improvise to the beat of the DJ’s tracks in a bid to secure votes from five judges.
The athletes take turns to showcase their routines, with popular moves including the 6-step, toprock, windmill and freeze, as well as flips and even dancers spinning on their head. Their performances are judged on five criteria – technique, vocabulary (the variety of their moves), execution, musicality and originality – with the judges moving a digital slider towards the dancer who is winning the head-to-head battle by that measure. Each of the five criteria accounts for 20 per cent of the competitor’s final score, with the winner of the round decided based on the average of the five sliders.
The breaking competition at Paris 2024 will take place at the Place de la Concorde, with the women’s event on Friday followed by the men’s event on Saturday. The b-boys and b-girls are divided into groups of four for an initial round-robin stage, battling all the other breakers in their group to decide which two progress to the quarter-finals. The eight quarter-finalists are then seeded into one-on-one single elimination (lose and you’re out) battles based on their previous performance (for example, first versus eighth, second versus seventh).
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This process is repeated for the semi-finals and the finals to crown the inaugural Olympic breaking champions. 2023 world champions Victor Montalvo, of the United States, and Lithuania’s Dominika Banevič (better known as B-Girl Nicka) were the first two competitors to book their places for Paris.
Authors
Alex Dakers
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