From Boogie Down the Bronx to Place de la Concorde, breakdancing has made it to the Olympics.
There was trash talking, cheering and beatboxing in an atmosphere unlike any other sport.
The stands reportedly shook with the excited energy of the crowd.
Moves, twists and beats reaching back to the Bronx of the 1970s and ’80s were transported 3,600 miles across the Atlantic, with 16 dancers each capturing the rhythm and adjusting on the fly to challenge history.
The B-girl competition kicked off on Friday with Snoop Dogg performing the French “Banging of the Brigadier,” a move that involves banging a stick on the ground three times.
The field included Queens resident Sunny Choi as part of Team USA’s team, and in the end, Japan’s Ami Yuasa (who competed under the nickname “Ami”) defeated Lithuania’s Dominika Banević (“Nikka”) to win the sport’s first gold medal.
Neither Choi nor fellow U.S. team member Logan Edler made it past the round-robin stage.
Olympic braking mechanics
- Two DJs chose the music from a playlist of 400 songs, but the dancers had no idea what to expect.
- The dancers had to perform four types of moves in succession to the rhythm of the music: top rock (standing up), down rock (lowering close to the ground), power moves (somersaults and other movements) and freezes (pauses).
- One of the more difficult moves is the windmill, where the torso rolls on the floor and the legs form a V in the air.
- Another common move is the six-step pattern, where you move your feet in a circular motion, alternating between each other, with one hand on the ground and your body close to it.
- The one-on-one competition consisted of three rounds of one minute each.
- The nine-judge panel scored the pieces based on musicality, vocabulary, performance, technique and originality.
- The competition began with a round-robin format, with two dancers from each group advancing to the finals.
But the fact that breakdancing was here in the first place – that Ami and Nika’s medals are worth the same as Noah Lyles’ medals and Simone Biles’ medals – was just as important as what happened to breakdancing girl on Friday and what happened to breakdancing boy on Saturday.
An uncertain future
Breaking will be one of the sports making its Olympic debut in 2024, but is not on the program for the Los Angeles Games.
So this is also a tryout, putting the sport in the public eye and potentially leading to a return to the Olympics.
“I still shined and I feel like I represented dance well,” Edla said. “It was such a big opportunity. It’s such a big stage. I’m really happy to be here.”
Each round, from the round robin through to the knockout stage, consisted of individual matches, with the top two teams from each group advancing to the final tournament.
According to the broadcast, the nine-member judges critiqued the dancers’ musicality, vocabulary, execution, technique and originality.
According to The New York Times, competitors were tasked with combining top rocks, down rocks, power moves and freezes (which essentially involve standing, being close to the ground, twisting in between and holding a pose), all to music selected by DJs Steven Fleg (DJ Fleg) of Brooklyn and Marcin Preplaszko (DJ Plush) of Poland from a playlist of 400 songs, including 1970s funk and 1990s hip hop.
The dancers didn’t know what music would be played, but they adapted.
“It’s so strange to feel like we’re in an in-between role, but it’s a very important role,” Flegu told The Times. “Music is the backbone of hip-hop and dance. Without music, there’s no dance.”
The day was packed with newsworthy moments, including when Afghanistan’s Manizah Tarash appeared on stage in the preliminary round and just seconds later shed her jacket to reveal a blue cape bearing the message “Liberate the Women of Afghanistan.”
She did not address the incident to reporters after the match, but her opponent applauded, fans cheered and her translator and coach said, “I think what she did on stage was enough,” according to Yahoo Sports.
Australia’s Macquarie University professor Rachel Gunn (“Ray Gunn”) also wowed social media viewers by simply wearing an Australian Olympic sweatshirt and baseball cap, unlike the other costumes she wore on stage during the battle, but that was before she failed to receive a single vote from the judges in the three round-robin competitions, as she relied on awkward, disjointed movements compared to the other dancers.
“I didn’t get the memo about not representing the country’s colors,” said Gunn, who, like Tarrasch, did not advance to the qualifying round. He told Yahoo Sports“What’s going on there?”
When it wasn’t the dancers’ turn, they were often heckling in some way.
After China’s Liu Qingyi, nicknamed 671, slammed her head on the ground and tapped her foot during a pose in the semi-finals, she wagged her finger and Nika tried to follow suit.
The dancers skipped around the stage before beginning their battle.
2024 Paris Olympics
They swayed to the music and their opponents’ movements between segments.
After winning her gold medal, Ami came down from the stage, like the other athletes, and began signing autographs.
“Breaking is my expression,” Yuasa said, according to the Associated Press. “It’s an expression, it’s an art, but I would say breaking can also be a part of sports.”
Perhaps this was a bit unusual for the Olympics, different from the everyday sights and sounds in Tokyo, Rio and other places that have previously hosted the Summer Olympics.
It probably won’t happen again on this stage, even after 2024.
But in the run up to the event, expectations of destruction were high.
And the scene that followed made good use of that.
“The Olympics needed to be suspended because it’s like a breath of fresh air,” Banevich said.
