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How Do They Judge Breaking at the 2024 Summer Olympics? It's More Art Than Science
Breaking debuts as an Olympic sport at the Paris Games. To get there, the breaking community had to figure a way to objectively judge the subjective, while letting the dance remain a dance.
The IOC selected the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF) to shepherd the dance along its Olympic trajectory, an interesting choice given that it had no prior relationship with breaking or the community that created it. Assigning point values would also make it inevitable that the more acrobatic elements of the dance—the ones that drew the IOC’s attention in the first place—would get prioritized ahead of the subtler yet crucial components of breaking, such as toprock and footwork. A B-boy I once knew back when I was a thoroughly mediocre B-girl in my 20s told me that he didn’t do power because he believed that he could win solely through his sharp footwork, creative toprock, and overall style.
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