From the Boogie Down Bronx to the Place de la Concorde, break dancing has made it to the Olympics.
There was trash talking, cheering and beat boxing in an atmosphere unlike any other sport.
The bleachers reportedly swayed from the crowd’s built-up energy.
There were moves and contortions and beats that dated back to The Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s, just shifted across the Atlantic Ocean, 3,600 miles away, as 16 respective dancers picked up on rhythms and adjusted on the fly for a shot at history.
The B-girls competition kicked off Friday with Snoop Dogg doing France’s “banging of the brigadier,” striking a staff three times on the ground.
Contestants included Queens resident Sunny Choi as one of the Team USA representatives and ended with Japan’s Ami Yuasa (who competes under the moniker “Ami”) outdueling Lithuania’s Dominika Banevic (“Nicka”) for the sport’s first gold medal.
Neither Choi nor Team USA member Logan Edra advanced out of the round-robin stage.
How Olympic breaking works
- Two DJs picked the music from a 400-song playlist — the dancers did not know what was coming.
- The dancers had to perform a series of four types of moves: Top rocks (standing up), down rocks (low to the ground), power moves (flips and other maneuvers in between) and freezes (poses) that fit the music’s rhythm.
- One difficult move is the windmill, in which the torso rolls on the floor and the legs make a V-shape in the air.
- Another common move is the six-step pattern, which alternates feet in a circular motion with one hand on the ground and the body close to it.
- Each one-on-one competition consisted of three rounds of one minute each.
- Nine judges graded them on musicality, vocabulary, execution, technique and originality.
- The competition began with a round-robin, from which two dancers from each group advanced to the championship bracket.
But the fact breakdancing was here in the first place — that Ami’s medal and Nicka’s medal counted the same as Noah Lyles’ medal and Simone Biles’ medal — mattered as much as what unfolded Friday with the B-girls or what unfolds Saturday with the B-boys.
Uncertain future
It’s one of the sports debuting in the 2024 Olympics, though breaking isn’t on the Los Angeles program.
So if anything, this doubled as a tryout, a way to get the sport on the map and perhaps lead to an Olympics return.
“I feel like I still shined, and I feel like I still represented the dance and had some moments,” Edra said. “It was such a big opportunity. It’s such a big platform, and I’m really happy that we’re here.”
Each of the rounds, from the round-robin to the knockout stage, consisted of individual battles, with each group’s top two representatives advancing into the championship bracket.
Nine judges critiqued the dancers on musicality, vocabulary, execution, technique and originality, according to the broadcast.
The competitors were tasked with blending together top rocks, down rocks, power moves and freezes — moves done while essentially standing up, being close to the ground, twisting around in between and holding a pose, respectively — done to music selected by two DJs, Stephen Fleg (DJ Fleg) from Brooklyn and Marcin Przeplasko (DJ Plash) from Poland off a 400-song playlist that included 1970s funk and 1990s hip-hop, according to The New York Times.
The dancers did not know what music was coming, but they adjusted.
“It’s very odd, feeling like we have this middle role sort of thing, but it’s a very important role,” Fleg told the Times. “It’s the backbone of hip-hop and dance. There’s no dance without the music.”
The day provided plenty of viral moments, too. In the qualifying round, Afghanistan’s Manizha Talash donned a blue cape — with the message “Free Afghan Women” — after taking off her top layer just seconds after starting on the stage.
She didn’t address the cape afterward with reporters, according to Yahoo Sports, but her opponent applauded, fans cheered and her translator and handler said, according to the outlet, “What she did on stage I think is enough.”
Australia’s Rachael Gunn (“Raygun”), a professor at Macquarie University, also captivated viewers on social media by simply wearing the country’s Olympic sweatshirt and a baseball hat, different from the other outfits that cycled onto the stage throughout the battles, and that was before she didn’t earn a single vote from the judges in each of her three round-robin matchups — relying on moves that were awkward and disjointed compared with those used by the other dancers.
“I didn’t get the memo that we weren’t gonna rep our country colors,” Gunn, who like Talash didn’t advance to the elimination round, told Yahoo Sports. “What’s going on there?”
When it wasn’t a dancer’s turn, they often engaged in some form of heckling, too.
After Liu Qingyi from China, who goes by 671, froze on her head in the semifinal round and clapped her feet together during the pose, she waved her finger while Nicka then tried to follow.
The dancers skipped around the stage before they started their battle.
2024 PARIS OLYMPICS
They bobbed with the music and the moves from their opponents in between their segments.
Ami, after earning the gold medal, walked off the stage and started signing autographs — just as any other athlete would.
“Breaking is my expression,” Yuasa said, according to the AP. It’s an “expression, an art, but I want to say that breaking also could be part of sports.”
Maybe this was all a bit unusual for the Olympics, different from the routine sights and sounds from Tokyo and Rio and anywhere else that has hosted the Summer Games.
Maybe it won’t happen again on this stage beyond 2024, either.
But the anticipation surrounding breaking had bubbled ahead of the event.
Then, the spectacle that followed capitalized on it.
“Olympics needed breaking because it’s like a breath of fresh air,” Banevic said.
