Breakdancing was one of four new sports along with skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing to get the Olympic green light on Monday for inclusion at the 2024 Paris Games. The four sports were included as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive board met to confirm the Paris 2024 programme.
Skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing have already been added to the programme for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which will take place in 2021 after being postponed by a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Priority
The introduction of breakdancing was “one of the results of the Olympic Agenda 2020”, IOC president Thomas Bach said. “We had a clear priority to introduce sports (that are) particularly popular among the younger generation.”
Breakdancing, which grew up alongside hip hop in the South Bronx of New York in the 1970s and is officially known in sport terms as “breaking”, appeared at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, in the form of head-to-head “battles”.
Russia's Sergei Chernyshev, competing under the nickname Bumblebee, won the first breakdancing gold medal for boys in that event, while Japan’s Ramu Kawai won the girls' title.
Federations of sports already having Olympic status were disappointed in their bid to increase events within their sports as Bach said none of the proposed 41 events would be included in Paris.
