Sources: Sportsnews

This month, breakdancing has been included as a medal event for the 2024 Paris Games.

As expected, the prospect of seeing B Girls and B Boys — that’s what break dancers are called — in the company of elite athletes triggered mixed reactions. While the old school hasn’t stopped rolling its eyes, the regulars on the breaking circuit vouch for this new Olympic discipline’s faster, higher and stronger fundamentals.

Around 2016, the idea that Breaking could neatly fit into the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) was floated by the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF). Sensing how dynamic, creative and urban it inherently was, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) drafted it into the YOG to be held at Buenos Aires in 2018, where the first of the ‘Battles’ took place in front of a massively smitten audience. Huge vocal crowds at the venue, and encouraging figures backing the sport from the broadcasting Olympic Channel and social media, helped Breaking leapfrog over several other sports.

In December 2018, organisers of the 2024 Paris Games told WDSF they were very receptive in including Breaking provisionally in the Paris Games programme and a full inclusion was announced this December.

The likely format at Paris will see 32 breakers (16 B-Boys and 16 B-Girls) compete over two days of 1vs1 competitive duels in hip-hop freestyle called ‘Battles’. Preliminaries on Day 1 and Finals on Day 2, similar to the World Urban Games last year, will be judged under the ‘Trivium Value System’.

Six criteria are considered: technique, variety, performativity, musicality, creativity and personality. In duels, two breakers face-off and are judged directly against each other. Dancers typically do not choose their music and are expected to react and adapt to bears in real-time. DJs, an emcee, well-respected judges, and members of the local Breaking community stand encircling the dance floor as the Battlers go three rounds back and forth between them to the same music.

The 32 breakers who qualified for the World Urban Games last September, came from 21 different countries, including Venezuela, Egypt and Bulgaria. The 24 dancers at the Youth Olympic Games represented 18 countries (with nine different countries from three continents winning medals), while 66 countries took part in the 2019 WDSF World Breaking Championship in Nanjing including dancers from Bhutan, Cameroon, El Salvador, India, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Laos and Rwanda