Breaking’s Olympic Debut Was a Little Goofy, But That’s OK
The Paris 2024 Olympics were clearly saving the best for last — no, not the big finals in basketball, soccer, volleyball, or even the modern pentathlon. We’re talking about the official debut of Breaking (or breakdancing), which bowed with the women’s competition on Friday, Aug. 9.
After an introduction provided by the 2024 Olympics’ Number One correspondent, Snoop Dogg, B-girls from around the world hit the Olympic stage to duke it out on the dancefloor (the men’s competition will be held tomorrow, Aug. 10). A lot of anticipation has been building for this moment: The International Committee announced the inclusion of Breaking back in 2020, and there’s been a plethora of media coverage about the new contest since.
As such, many were pumped, especially those who recognized how remarkable it was to see a breaking, with its deep ties to hip-hop culture, ascend to the pantheon of the Olympics. “This is gonna blow the minds of people that haven’t seen breaking in a while,” Ice T tweeted. “All Respect to HIPHOP.”
Even still, that probably wasn’t enough to prepare a lot of people for what a Breaking competition would actually look like. For some folks, the pleasures were immediate and simple: “Just tuned into breaking and the names alone have me seated,” one person wrote on X, alongside a photo showing that competitors would be using their stage names, not their real names — in this case, the USA’s Logistx (Logan Edra) versus Australia’s Raygun (Rachael Gunn).
“I could live all my life and never come up with anything as funny as Raygun, the 36-year-old Australian Olympic breakdancer,” someone else tweeted. Another person quipped, “Breakdancing at the Olympics is already amazing simply for the visual of seeing somebody from Lithuania in a durag.”
As the opening rounds of the contest got underway, more people chimed in with their reviews, which leaned towards the appreciatively goofy, though not without some snark (hey, it is the internet after all). “Big disney channel original movie vibe to this olympic break dancing,” someone wrote, while another added, “Dude watching some countries break dancing is probably the funniest stuff you will see all week in literal tears.”
While some were more prone to hating, the reality was summed up perfectly by one user who embraced the ridiculousness, while also acknowledging the best performers were doing something only seasoned athletes with tons of training could do — in other words, putting on a show worthy of the Olympics: “This Breaking competition is both dope and cringe lol.”
To be fair, these reactions were something many breakers were concerned about in the lead up to the Olympics. In an interview with Rolling Stone, U.S. men’s B-boy Victor Montalvo acknowledged the diluted nature of an Olympic competition (like many other public breaking competitions): The contest will be more one-on-one, rather than embracing the long history of crew battles, and there were also concerns over what music the IOC would be able, or willing, to license without breaking the bank.
“That’s one of the hardest things,” Montalvo said. “We fell in love with the dancing because we fell in love with the music. But when we compete we don’t have the music we fell in love with, that made us dance at first.”
Luckily, as it turns out, it does seem the IOC shelled out a bit for the approximately 400 songs it licensed. Jonathan Schecter, co-founder of The Source, kept a running tab of some of the tunes used, including Eric B and Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique,” “Blow Your Head” by Fred Wesley and the J.B.’s,, and “Hot Music” by S.O.H.O.
“The competition and the music are both getting stronger as the competition progresses,” Schecter tweeted. “Some very exciting battles, the energy driven by premium uptempo selections.”
