Newest Olympic Sport Induces Gold-Level Cringefest

The urban dance style breaking officially made its debut as a competitive sport at the Paris Olympics on Friday, and rapper Snoop Dogg was there to kick off the occasion.

The legendary rapper came out to his hit “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and performed the opening brigadier ceremony—with fellow rapper Ice T tweeting his support of the event, writing: “This is gonna blow the minds of people that haven’t seen breaking in a while… INCREDIBLE All Respect to HIPHOP.”

The competition began with three strikes of a wooden staff on the floor of an arena fashioned to resemble an old vinyl record. Then came the breaking (don’t call it breakdancing). Up first for the “b-girls” was 18-year-old India Sardjoe of the Netherlands and 21-year-old Manizha Talash from Kabul, representing the official Olympic refugee team.

Talash missed the deadline to register for qualifying events, but the IOC set up a special pre-qualifier to allow her to compete in Paris.

Each head-to-head battle consisted of three rounds, or throwdowns, with the breakers taking alternating one-minute turns. The breakers deploy four main moves—toprock, downrock, rotational power moves, and freezes—and are judged on five criteria: vocabulary, technique, execution, originality and musicality. They’re also judged in real-time, via a digital slider, so spectators can see who is in front.

B-girl Sardjoe, showing off her power moves, won the pre-qualifier 3-0. But b-girl Talash managed to get her point across, wrapping herself in a cape bearing the words “FREE AFGHAN WOMEN,” ignoring the IOC’s strict ban on political statements at Olympic venues.

At its best, breaking is exciting, dynamic, even beautiful. When it doesn’t work, it can be a bit cringeworthy—or as one critic put it on Friday, “turbo cringe.”

However, breaking and its historical antecedents—the African juba, the Brazilian martial art capoeira, or the 1970s dance battles of Harlem or the Bronx—have always been competitive in nature. Some might argue breaking makes more competitive sense than having a horse walk sideways or getting grown men to race down icy tracks on a tea tray.

Besides, the IOC has long ago perfected the art of co-opting youth culture to entice new generations of fans to watch the Olympics. They added snowboarding to the Games, skateboarding, surfing, kitesurfing and bouldering. Money talks, plus all the kids want to win an Olympic medal.

But breaking? Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Paris-born founder of the modern Olympic Games, must be spinning in his grave. On his head perhaps: Old Pierre always loved a good power move.

Read more at The Daily Beast.