The 2024 Olympic Games saw the addition of breakdancing/breaking to the competition. While opinions regarding whether breaking should have become a competition in the world’s biggest sporting event, the event’s inclusion allowed an enormous audience to learn more about something potentially new to them.
However, its lifespan was short-lived. The 2028 Summer Los Angeles Olympic Games will not include breaking competitions. The decision to eliminate the event seems incredibly confusing and raises an intriguing question: what exactly makes a sport an Olympic Sport, and where is the line drawn between breakdancing and the rest of the Olympic lineup?
The Olympics make the process of creating a new event seem straightforward. An article from their website mentions several criteria for a sport to gain the Olympic moniker. Among crucial requirements, fairness and a general understanding of the sport is the requirement for “Global Reach.” However, it is not enough for a sport to gain global awareness; the article also states that an Olympic Sport “must be practiced by men in at least 75 countries and by women in at least 40 countries across three continents.”
While it makes sense for global competitions to restrict event types, these rules make breaking’s removal more baffling. An article from the journal Frontiers mentions how breakdancing spread across the globe as tourists visiting New York learned about the growing interest in hip-hop in the seventies. The article also notes how breakdancing’s popularity blossomed with the advent of social media, which spread it further and led to breakdancing competitions. Breakdancing has the global reach required by the Olympic Committee to become an official event, yet it has still been excluded.
The 2024 Summer Olympics were home to uniquely bizarre removals as well. According to an article written by NBC’s Andrew Woodin, karate received the same fate as breaking between the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2024 Paris Olympics. While most people might not be familiar with the details of karate as a sport, a sizable portion of the global population participates in karate. Despite this, it has been removed as well.
It does not seem like the Olympics removed these sports for any other reason mentioned in their aforementioned article regarding the prerequisites to become an Olympic event. The rules of breaking seem clear, the sport does not seem unethical and the likelihood of the Olympics not having the funds needed to license music is slim to none.
However, there is a link between these two removals. The Olympics’ website details how “the host country of the Olympic Games can also play a role in deciding what sports can be included.” They mention the recent addition of breaking after this, indirectly claiming France contributed significantly to the activity’s inclusion. Regardless of why they wanted to add this sport to the Olympics, it holds enough significance in their culture that France wanted to highlight it.
Karate shares similarities to breaking in this regard. While the sport did not originate from Japan, it is still a notable part of their culture.Additionally, the 2028 summer games will take place in Los Angeles and feature the return of Baseball–the quintessential American pastime–as an Olympic sport.
While it is unfortunate that these sports only briefly stood on the stage of the Olympics, their momentary inclusion contributes more to the Olympics’ inherent message of worldwide competition and diversity. They show off what each host country wants the rest of the world to know about them and it allows for a spotlight to shine on a culture we may never know about otherwise.
