Paris 2024: Breaking at the Olympics: formidable or a misfire? Rachel Anne Gillett

As an historian, attending the women’s breaking qualifiers at Concorde Urban Park in Paris, Friday 9 October 2024, took on an added dimension. I was witnessing history. Breakdancing had never been included in the Olympics before. It may never be again. The medals awarded here would be global ‘firsts.’ Having secured tickets on the day of the event, I entered the arena. Snoop Dog, much-memed American rapper hammered out the ‘trois coups’ to start the show. And after a pre-qualifer in which B-girl Talash, an Afghani refugee athlete, unfurled a cape reading “free Afghani women” (and was instantly disqualified) the B-girl battles commenced.

The athleticism was breathtaking. Competitors showcased advances in the genre in the last five decades. In contemporary breaking, floor moves now combine with aerial and upright (toprock) moves that would be at home on the pommel or the floor show in the Gymnastics. In the Olympic format breakers ‘battled’ against each other, dancing in short bursts to live DJ music, and judges evaluated them on technique, musicality, execution, vocabulary (range of different moves, heritage moves, and unique combinations) and originality. To be there in person was to be left in no doubt of the Olympian demands of the sport and in awe at its artistry.

The inclusion of Breakdancing in the Paris Olympics also illustrates the politics and privilege that characterize this global sporting juggernaut. The World Dancesport Federation had originally pitched Ballroom dancing for inclusion but the Olympic committee suggested Breaking (or breakdancing) better fit the youthful urban vibe they wanted to project. Breaking paid tribute to the Francophone world’s longtime global dominance in rap, hip hop, graffiti, and breakdance. It showcased France’s patrimoine and diversity (while glossing over the politics of the banlieue that Mame-Fatou Niang and Karim Hammou, among others have analysed). It was, however, a top-down inclusion policy. Longtime scholars and grassroots practitioners argued the process was similar to that of a ‘cool uncle’ who takes the kids out to the fair, feeds them candy all day and puts them on all the scary rides then brings them home to their parents exhausted, sticky, over-hyped and likely to wake up with nightmares.

This was the context within which Rachel Gunn, the Australian competitor, qualified. The qualifiers in Europe utilized longstanding competitions. French competitors, for example, were trained, supported and provided with infrastructure leading up to the games. The lead male competitor for France, Dany Dan, was funded by the state to prepare for the Olympics. The Oceania qualifiers, in contrast, were announced close to the event. Competitors needed a passport to register and many had to purchase air tickets on short notice, or fulfill citizenship requirements they did not yet meet. This emptied the playing field in a region where the dancesport is under-supported and male-dominated, as Rachel Gunn’s own research documents.

The Paris location for the breaking was dynamic and historic. The ‘urban park’ that hosted breaking, skating and 3-on-3 basketball was erected in the Place de la Concorde. Its iconic golden spike anchored brightly coloured stands and crowds of eager fans who cheered rapturously when French competitors appeared. This setting reflected French patrimoine showcasing the forty-plus years of hip hop’s presence in a venue midway along the sweeping avenue from the Louvre up to the Arc de Triomphe.

The 'urban park' sports arena with multiple stages and seating arenas. Crowds of people are visible in the tiered seating and walking around.
The ‘urban park’ setting for the Breaking competition, Place de la Concorde, Paris. Author’s own photo.

Hip hop’s five pillars (graffiti, MC-ing, DJ-ing, breaking, and knowledge/fashion making) are now truly part of France’s artistic canon. Afrika Bambaata’s tour of 1982 brought with it breakdancers and fostered a booming French rap scene that has shone brightly ever since. Mitterrand, and his culture minister Jack Lang, championed (at least in abstract) the genre and released significant funds for break dancing to be taught in state-sponsored community and institutional dance settings. Sarkozy decried French rap and identified it and the banlieues in which it took hold, as problems. Yet Sarkozy’s son is a hip hop producer. The French right wing is now mobilizing rap for political aims, while activists proclaim the virtues of ‘conscious’ rap that engages issues of racism, and others refuse that moral burden.

Dany Dan and Syssy, the two favoured French competitors, illustrate this rich post/colonial history. Dany Dan, Danis Civil, narrates his own hip hop success story as that of a gifted Francophone boy from French Guiana who encountered breakdancing and was transported, literally, moving to Paris to pursue the art. He works as a nurse, is married and settled in France, and at thirty-four, is one of the more experienced competitors. He is in France because of empire and he tells a proud French inclusion story. Syssy, Sya Dembélé, the favoured French female competitor heading into the games, is the daughter of a Burkinabé griot and a choreographer, and was raised in St Etienne outside of Lyon.

In the qualifer Syssy performed with grace, elegance and power. Her performance was utterly eclipsed in the media that followed—although not on the day itself—by that of Raygunn, the B-girl lecturer from MacQuarie University who practices autho-ethnography. Dr. Rachel Gunn writes about representation, misogyny and access to breaking in her scholarly work. She also writes about how she, as a scholar, sees her work in relation to hip hop feminisms and is careful about how she claims what she sees as a Black feminist tradition. A final point from her work that may help explain how her stage performance came to be, is that she argues that the Australian style favours the persona of the ‘larrikin’. Her auto-ethnographic work documented how she noticed and sometimes adopts this persona, that subverts and undermines institutions and works from a position of dry wit, comedy and self-deprecation, as well as feminist or gender-defying stances. One of her scholarly arguments is that B-girls have to represent, have to perform in high stakes mixed environments to provide narratives for a dancesport in which women have been marginalized. Her own ethnographic interviews show that every story matters, and she analyzes how B-girls ‘manage the haunting pressures of minority representation: that every b-girl represents all b-girls’. And yet she put herself in that mix on perhaps the largest global stage breaking has ever had. Given her scholarly engagement, the fact that Raygunn ended up dominating the narrative at the Paris Olympics is rich in irony.

So this historic new day for ‘the culture’ (as hip hop is often called) showed continuities. It was a product of French (post)colonial migration and cultural change, challenge, and adaptation. Of hip hop’s entanglement with racial politics. Commentators have pointed to the harm done as Raygun sucked the bandwidth from the brilliant performers around her, although in the lived moment this wasn’t the vibe. At the panel when the Olympics was compared to the irresponsible Uncle, the dialogue ended with many audience members expressing the hope that if Breaking once more appears on our Olympic screens, it can be done with more care. The Paris Olympics offered spectacle and ample scope for speculation about what the future of breaking at the Olympics will hold. It remains to be seen who, now, will determine access to the stages on which these Olympian stories play out.

Rachel Anne Gillett is a tenured academic in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Utrecht. She is the author of At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Project Leader of Re/Presenting Europe: Popular Representations of Diversity and Belonging in the Netherlands.

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