The International Olympic Committee has officially added Breakdancing to the medal events program at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. It will be called breaking, as it was originally dubbed by the dancers at hip-hop’s first parties in the Bronx in the 1970s. First proposed by Paris organizers after trials at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Olympic breaking will joining sport climbing and 3-on-3 basketball competitions at the Place de le Concorde in Paris.
Breaking was not originally conceived as a sport, but as a form of artistic expression that takes its name from the “breaks” that hip-hop DJs would loop from popular disco and funk tracks, featuring isolated drum parts ideal for dancing. After a wave of mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it has evolved to include competitions of highly acrobatic feats of athleticism, which these Olympic events are likely to resemble.
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