What is breaking at the Olympics 2024? Rules explained
The first rule of breaking is: you do not talk about breakdancing.
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 among the sports to be contested 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 the Paris 2024 event line-up, including skateboarding and BMX freestyle.
But just what does the Olympics’ newest sport actually involve?
RadioTimes.com breaks it all down, including the rules of the sport at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
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What is breaking?
Breaking is a style of street dance which originated in 1970s New York City.
The sport can be traced back to the New York borough of the Bronx in the early 1970s, where the dance style began to grow at events like block parties in tandem with the increasing popularity of the hip-hop genre of music.
The 'break' is the part of a song where vocals and other instruments fade out, leaving just the percussion – and it is 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 back in the 1990s.
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 addition to the event line-up for Paris 2024.
Breaking rules and format explained
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 sliding a digital slider towards the dancer who is winning the head-to-head battle based on each of them.
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 criteria sliders.
The breaking competition at Paris 2024 will take place at the Place de la Concorde, with the women’s event on 9th August followed by the men’s event on 10th August.
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).
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.
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