Breakdancing is about to become a medaled event. The International Olympic Committee has recommended breakdancing to join the Olympic Games in 2024. The IOC plans to add the dancing as a way to make the Olympics more “urban,” per IOC president Thomas Bach.
According to The Washington Post, the IOC also recommended sport climbing, surfing and skateboarding be added to the program of the 2024 games, set to take place in Paris, France. The IOC’s executive board met Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland, and recommended the four sports be added to the games. While it’s far from official just yet — the full committee needs to approve the sports in June — it is a big step in the process.
Skateboarding, climbing and surfing have already been approved for the summer games in Tokyo next year, part of the a significant youth movement by the IOC to get younger people involved.
“They contribute to make the program of the Games more gender-balanced, more youthful and more urban,” Bach said according to The Washington Post on Tuesday. “These four sports also offer the opportunity to connect with the young generation there.”
The WaPo story detailed how a prior competition at the Summer Youth Olympics was run and how the IOC plans to implement a similar program for the IOC in Paris.
Break dancing, an acrobatic and athletic form of street dancing, has only recently seen momentum among sports enthusiasts. Breaking, as it’s often called, was staged for the first time at the Summer Youth Olympics last October in Buenos Aires, featuring boys, girls and a mixed-team events. The sport features a series of dance “battles,” set to music, which are scored by a panel of judges. No Americans qualified for the Argentina competition.
Bach said IOC officials will monitor the proposed Paris sports through 2020 “to see how they perform, to see how they manage their sport, to look at the governance, to look at the integrity of their competitions, to look at the referring and judging system and so on.”
Bach says the youth initiative is to “get the couch potatoes off the couch,” but it’s unclear if couch potatoes will know how to breakdance at an Olympic level.
