BREAKING (WHICH you may know as breakdancing) will make its Olympic debut—the only sport to do so—at this summer’s Paris games. It joins new urban sports BMX, skateboarding and 3v3 basketball, which debuted at Tokyo 2020, and is part of a broader shift by the International Olympic Committee to include more youth-oriented events. Yet breaking is judged in a completely different way—a way that ensures audiences will see something entirely new at these Olympics.
Breakers are judged against five evenly weighted criteria: technique, execution, musicality (keeping in mind breakers don’t know what music will play ahead of time), vocabulary (range and repertoire of moves), and originality (new moves, personal style, spontaneity). Rather than each dancer being given an individual score for specific moves, breaking is judged using a comparative system. That is, a competitor is directly compared against their opponent in each round of a battle. The breaker with the most judges’ votes wins that round, and the one with the most rounds at the end wins the battle.
The openness of this judging system allows for variety, spontaneity and newness: a breaker known for their artistry has just as much of a chance as one whose speciality is athleticism. It guarantees that a range of repertoires will be showcased. Moreover, penalties for repeating major moves or movement sequences ensure that individual repertoires will be varied.
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