For whatever reason, the Olympic’s website lists it as just “breaking,” which I find a little odd, but nonetheless, it’s a sport that entirely deserves to be there. If you’re not in the loop, the 2024 Paris Olympics have just introduced breakdancing as a discipline, and for many it’s been the target of much complaining, as many don’t believe it to be worthy of being held at the Olympics. Although I’m not an athlete, nor am I an avid sports fan, I find their complaints to be completely ridiculous. So, I’d like to run through some of the common attacks against Olympic breakdancing and refute them.
One of the most frequent grumblings I have read is “Oh, so x can’t be a sport, but breakdancing can?” and insert x with pickleball or something. To me, this just reads as butthurt people boohooing because their preferred sport didn’t make it in. Advocate for your sport all you want, but there is no need to tear down other disciplines to do it.
People have also claimed that it takes little to no athleticism, and thus it cannot be a sport. I’m not sure how you can watch people spin on their head and perform incredible feats of flexibility and then claim that there is hardly any athleticism involved at all. All you have to do is watch a single match of breakdancing to find this assertion incorrect. And despite being such a laughably flawed sentiment, it’s a startling common one. I find this line of reasoning to be objectively wrong, and I struggle to see how anyone could genuinely believe it without being completely blinded by hate for breakdancing. Anyhow, I’d argue there are several Olympic sports that require less athleticism than breakdancing, such as shooting or equestrian.
There’s also a complaint about the subjectivity of scoring; how exactly does one deem one breakdancing performance stronger than another? It’s a fair critique, but remember that this is nothing new to the Olympics. Sports like artistic gymnastics, artistic swimming, and the recently introduced skateboarding are all based on points given by a judge. And when people bring this point up, they often seem to not realize that the judges are rating based off given criteria, and not however they happen to feel that particular afternoon. However, I understand that introducing the objectivity of certain criteria does not remove the subjectivity altogether. Still, I don’t find it compelling enough to strike off trying to judge breakdancing completely (and then by that reasoning remove gymnastics and artistic swimming from the Olympics). Dance competitions exist, and no, it is not “100% subjective.”
Some people also appear to be outright offended by the idea of breakdancing itself. “Breakdancing? In my Olympics? They’ll just add anything nowadays!” This is likely a result of breakdancing birth in the underground hip-hop scene, and so it’s not “respectable” like the other Olympic sports. And I’d just like to ask, what exactly is so classy about throwing a ball really far or shooting a ball into a basket that makes it more worthy of the Olympics than breakdancing? It all just reeks of ignorance, as people who have no exposure to the sport attack it because they don’t know much about it, and because it’s always existed in their mind as that thing that people do on a piece of cardboard in a back alley somewhere.
The last thing I’d like to address surprisingly comes from breakdancing fans themselves. It goes like this: by adding breakdancing to the Olympics, you are stripping it of its underground roots, selling out, and killing all of its soul. This is similar to what some skateboarders complained about when Olympic skateboarding was introduced in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. I find both arguments stupid. Something becoming a sport does not remove it “soul.” Athletes are not lifeless machines that just perform with no energy. They love their sport and compete with passion, probably more than the people complaining about there being no “soul.” And this complaint was voiced even before the first round of breakdancing even took place, so it’s silly to say this before even seeing any performances. It’s not preserving culture, it’s just gatekeeping.
Unfortunately, breakdancing is already confirmed not to be present at the 2028 Olympic games, so the chance for breakdancing to flourish under a new global audience has already been taken away before it could even start. One of the sports that has taken up the void left behind is squash, and I think I speak for most people when I say that I find breakdancing much more interesting than squash. Anyway, I don’t think people need to watch or even like breakdancing. I personally would have rather had baseball take its spot in this year’s Olympics. However, I do think people should recognize that it’s standing as an Olympic sport is perfectly reasonable, and that there’s no need to discredit it just because they don’t personally enjoy it.