“We’re going to bring something new to the table. We’re going to bring a vibe.”
That is how U.S. athlete Victor Montalvo describes the newest sport to reach the Olympics. At each Summer Games, the host city gets to add new events. Tokyo introduced surfing for the 2020 Games. In 2016 Rio de Janeiro featured rugby. When the XXXIII Olympiad opens in Paris next week, the new athletes will be breakdancers, aka B-boys and B-girls.
“We’re going to bring that peace, love, unity, and having fun,” Mr. Montalvo, a world champion breaker, told CGTN Sports Scene. “This is like a beautiful art form. ... You don’t need money, you know; you just need a dance floor. That’s it.”
New events sometimes raise a furtive brow among Olympic traditionalists. Yet the Games have long included sports that blend balletic grace with athletic agility. As with figure skating and gymnastics, breaking requires individual expression as well as technique and control.
The dancers do not choose their own music. Nothing is choreographed. They are scored on their musicality – or how they respond to the tracks played. In an unusual gesture, judges often open competitions by performing first.
Around the world, dance is closely associated with war or peace. The Cherokee taunted their enemies with the eagle dance, while the Maori in New Zealand did a haka. Their performances were not just demonstrations of prowess, but also stage-setters for dialogue, reconciliation, and charity.
So it is with breaking. The form arose in the Bronx in the late 1970s as a way to defuse tensions among youth from diverse urban communities. Events are called battles – street gatherings in which rivals forge respect, even affection, through joyful, artful competition.
Like hip-hop, the musical form it expresses, breaking has grown into a global phenomenon. For some of the athletes participating in Paris, such as Amir Zakirov of Kazakhstan, breaking was a path to personal redemption.
“When I was a kid, I smoked, I drank alcohol. I was in a very bad community,” he told Olympics.com. Breaking helped him express originality, agency, and freedom from limitation. “I started to understand what is bad, what is good.”
Mr. Zakirov’s experience is not uncommon. In a 2018 study in Ecuador, one youth described breaking as mental armor. A similar study in South Africa noted dancers had “a child-like innocence.” Logan Edra, an American dancer competing in Paris, says breaking helps erase differences based on age, gender, or race.
Its freedom of expression and joy of community, she told CGTN Sports Scene, are “a powerful energy that we’re bringing into the Olympics.” The modern Games, after all, were revived in the 19th century to bring about peaceful coexistence.
Mark Sappenfield
