Hey b-boys and b-girls: Breakdancing is finally an Olympic sport
The 2024 Paris Olympics just got way more fresh, with the International Olympic Committee announcing that it’s adding four new medal-eligible sports to the program: skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing, and breakdancing. Those first three will actually make their debut at the postponed Tokyo games, starting on July 23, 2021, but the IOC will be saving the flipping, freezing, gyros, and heelspins of breakdancing for Paris. This comes from the Associated Press, which says these four events have been chosen as part of the organization’s plan to use more “urban events” to “lure a younger audience” to the Olympics. (We don’t know what “urban” specifically means here, since it somehow applies to surfing, but it’s hopefully not being used as a shockingly outdated euphemism.)
As for breakdancing, it will officially be known as “breaking” in Paris, as that is the accepted term used by the people who invented it, and the competition will be held at the fancy-pants Place De La Concorde in downtown Paris (the thing with the big obelisk). The AP story doesn’t have any other details, but at least the Olympics are finally getting with the popular culture of today—or of 30 to 40 years ago, at least.
In other IOC news for Paris, both boxing and weightlifting are apparently getting dramatically cut, with the latter in danger of getting eliminated entirely over concerns about the sport’s ongoing doping problems. Maybe if all of those super-buff people had tried throwing some cardboard on the ground and doing cool flips instead? That’s what the Olympics are all about now anyway.