Paris 2024 Olympics: No, breakdancing should not be an Olympic sport

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PARIS — In these Olympic Games in Paris, I’ve seen basketball and soccer and tennis and swimming. I’ve seen horses dance and I’ve seen athletes run and shoot and run some more. I’ve seen Olympians do moves that would put me in traction, or even paralyze me. Other than Snoop Dogg, I’m not sure there are many people who have been to as many places as I have.

So believe me when I say: Not everything has to be an Olympic sport. Yes, breaking, I’m talking about you.

Breaking — please don’t call it breakdancing — made its Olympic debut on Friday. It’s a (mostly) impressive display of improvisational athleticism, a countercultural force of nature born of the turbulent 1960s and ’70s … and it has no place in the Olympics. It was an enjoyable two-day visit, and like all visitors, breaking shouldn’t linger too long.

The competition—it’s hard to call breaking a sport—has broken out before a large, raucous crowd on the Place de la Concorde. The general feeling on the breaking side is the joyful, “let’s put on a show!” atmosphere of a high school drama club. In the broader Olympic context, the IOC’s embrace of breaking is like your parents suddenly trying to like your music. You appreciate the gesture, but it’s completely unnecessary.

Before we go any further, let’s get a few facts straight here. First of all, there is no way I could do what the B-boys and B-girls do on an Olympic stage, not when I was their age and certainly not now. My ligaments would literally explode. In fact, there is not a single Olympian at these Games whose performance I could match. (Outside of Jayson Tatum, of course. I could damn well sit on a bench and clap Olympic style.)

There’s no denying that breaking is a valid, essential art form, a form of expression that can convey freedom and joy in a way that words can’t. There’s also no denying that you have to be a great athlete to pull off a 60-second improvisational routine where you can twist your entire body 1,440 degrees or support your entire weight with just one palm. It’s a physical expression of raw emotion, a historical tradition that tells its story at 130 beats per minute.

But here’s the rub. Trying to fit a countercultural artistic enterprise into a box created by the International Olympic Committee — the eldest of old-school conservatism — ends up blunting all the rough edges that make breaking such a vibrant force. That’s exactly what we saw on the circular, neon-ringed breaking stage Friday and Saturday night.

Between Portuguese Max Oliveira’s nonstop hype about these Games — seriously, if I had a dime for every time Max said “Make some noise!” I’d buy my own little castle and stay there — and the tastefully coordinated decor, this feels like a 2020s TV movie re-creation of an ’80s competition, dreamed up by people who weren’t there or don’t remember it.

Breaking is in the Olympics in the first place because the World DanceSport Federation fought for years to get some form of competitive dancing into the Olympics. The IOC believed that the WDSF’s original offering—ballroom dancing, one of the artistic expressions of my ancestral culture—wouldn’t resonate with a young audience. (They were right.) So the WDSF turned to breaking to appeal to a younger audience.

While the B-boys and -girls dancing at the Games are of course thrilled to be here, there is widespread concern among those long associated with breaking that this is simply another form of appropriation and dilution of an outsider art form. A 2017 petition, for example, criticized the WDSF’s decision to include breaking in the Olympics as “immoral, illogical, and insulting to the hundreds of thousands of b-boys and b-girls worldwide who live and breathe this culture.”

Breaking’s Olympic supporters have had a tough time both days. On Friday, the B-girls competition descended into a farce when Australian Rachel “Raygun” Gunn performed a floor-rolling performance that resembled a toddler having a tantrum on a supermarket floor.

Saturday saw the physical level rise, but questions remained about the judging. Japan’s Hiro10 took on Team USA’s Victor and threw down a routine that included multiple high-speed spins upside down on his head. When the judges ruled 6-3 in Victor’s favor, the crowd’s booing of disgust was so loud that the MCs had to beg the crowd to give the judges a break. You don’t see that in gymnastics.

Even the B-boys and -girls themselves are ambivalent about the Olympics and their effect on the sport. “The Olympics have changed the way some people dance,” Team USA’s Sunny Choi said Friday night, adding, “A lot of people just jam their rounds with all sorts of stuff — and there’s a lot of nonsense in there.” The further the divide moves toward sports, the further it strays from art.

Sure, being an Olympic sport carries a certain prestige. But the Olympics aren’t the only path to athletic immortality. Many elite athletes — NFL players, Formula One drivers, late-night Waffle House cooks — don’t have a path to the Olympics. And many elite sports — baseball, karate, possibly boxing — have also disappeared from the Olympic roster.

Breaking and the Olympics are a mismatch, plain and simple. Breaking is a powerful, physical art form. It’s not an Olympic sport. That’s okay — there’s no Olympic guitar solo contest, or an Olympic baking contest, or an Olympic painting contest. Art doesn’t need Olympic validation.

This was a fun one-off — weird, but fun — but if breaking wants to reach new audiences, there are better ways to do it than the Olympics. And if the Olympics wants to reach new audiences, it’s going to take a lot more than just throwing on a pair of baggy pants and dropping a beat to connect.