Breakdancing — one of the more dynamic and enduring outgrowths of the 1970s U.S. hip-hop movement — has officially become an Olympic sport.
On Monday, the International Olympic Committee added the now-wildly popular acrobatic dance battles to the 2024 Paris Games in hopes of appealing to a younger audience, ESPN reported.
The Tokyo Games, which were postponed until next summer because of the coronavirus pandemic, will feature skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing for the first time.
The breakdancing competition at the 2024 Olympics will be aptly called breaking, as it was in the 1970s by hip-hop pioneers in the United States, according to ESPN.
Breaking, a mix of rhythmic gymnastics and martial arts, took root as a dance style on the New York urban scene in the 1970s. By the 1980s, the dance moves were being glamorized in Hollywood films such as “Breakin’” and “Beat Street.”
Breakdancing was an urban creation, and its first practitioners were primarily of African-American and Puerto Rican descent.
In the 1970s and 1980s, break dancers called themselves B-Boys and many of them formed dance crews that would “battle” each other wherever there happened to be a smooth floor, or on street corners with the help of flattened cardboard boxes. This was important to performing the gravity-defying moves including the head-spin, windmill and backspin.
Copying someone else’s moves was known as “biting.”
In the decades since its creation, breakdancing has surged in popularity with annual competitions all around the world, where dancers perform choreographed and improvised stunts.
The addition of the break dance competition at the 2024 Olympics was first proposed by organizers two years ago following a successful test run at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, ESPN reported.
The Olympic Committee approved the move in 2019 after a vote by the board and its full membership.
The venue for the breakdancing competition has been revealed as the prestigious Place de le Concorde in downtown Paris, according to ESPN.
The Olympic Committee also plans to eliminate 10 athletic events from the Paris Games, including several weightlifting and boxing competitions, ESPN reported. The IOC said it was also focused on achieving parity between male and female athletes.
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