Will the Olympics break breakdancing?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For some sports, picking the winner is simple: It's the athlete who crosses the finish line first, or the side that scores the most goals. But for the new Olympic sport of breaking (if you want to be cool, don't call it breakdancing), the criteria aren't quite that straightforward. How do you judge an event whose core values are dopeness, freshness, and breaking the rules?

That was the challenge for Storm and Renegade, two legendary b-boys who set out to create a fair and objective scoring system for a dance they say is more of an art than a sport. Over the years, their journey to define the soul of breaking led them to meetings with Olympics bigwigs, debates over the science of dopeness, and a battle with a question many sports — from figure skating to gymnastics — have tried to answer: Can art and sport coexist?

This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Jenny Lawton. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez with help from James Willets and Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:12.0	from experienced financial advisors.
0:15.0	Hey, a heads up to our listeners. In today's episode, there's going to be some vulgar language.
0:20.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:24.0	This is the final round, y'all.
0:29.0	Let the battle begin. So there was this epic breakdancing battle that went down in 2008.
0:40.8	It is the finals of the Red Bull Championships.
0:44.3	Starts off with this B-boy from Japan called Ticeke.
0:47.4	Ticeke is throwing down this really fancy footwork.
0:50.2	It looks like he's dancing on the air. So now he's doing, he's doing a little bit of top rock,
0:56.0	nice, nice on the music.
0:58.0	This is Neil's Rabitzky.
1:01.0	He's this legendary bee boy who goes by the name of Storm. He was one of the
1:05.2	judges at this competition and he's walking us through a video of it.
1:08.6	Great control here into a chair freeze, very solid solo.
1:14.0	After Tiske, it's the other guy's turn.
1:17.0	His name is Wink. He's from South Korea.
1:20.0	And this guy has a totally different style.
1:22.0	Wing super stylish with his sweeps. This guy has a totally different style.
	...

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