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Will the Olympics break breakdancing?

By Jeff Guo,
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Jenny Lawton, Emma Peaslee
Published August 10, 2024 at 11:29 AM CDT
David Balogh
/
Getty Images

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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Music: NPR Source Audio- "Darkman X," "Hammer Tucked," "Boogie Down Bronx," and "Bboy Summer"

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danceOlympics
Jeff Guo
Jeff Guo (he/him) is a co-host and reporter for Planet Money, NPR's award-winning podcast that finds creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the complicated forces that move our economy. He joined the team in 2022.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi is a host and reporter for Planet Money, telling stories that creatively explore and explain the workings of the global economy. He's a sucker for a good supply chain mystery — from toilet paper to foster puppies to specialty pastas. He's drawn to tales of unintended consequences, like the time a well-intentioned chemistry professor unwittingly helped unleash a global market for synthetic drugs, or what happened when the U.S. Patent Office started granting patents on human genes. And he's always on the lookout for economic principles at work in unexpected places, like the tactics comedians use to protect their intellectual property (a.k.a. jokes).
See stories by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Jenny Lawton
Emma Peaslee
Emma Peaslee is a 2020-21 Kroc Fellow. Before coming to NPR, she reported for Atlanta's member station, WABE. She covered public forums about toxic chemicals leaking into neighborhoods, the world's largest 10K race, and the federal government's plan to resume executions. Peaslee has a master's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where her work received the 2020 Edward R. Murrow Award for best student newscast. She is a Minnesota native.