Planet Money - Will the Olympics break breakdancing?

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

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. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Let the battle begin! So, there was this epic breakdancing battle that went down in 2008. It is the finals of the Red Bull Championships. Starts off with this b-boy from Japan called Taiseke. Taiseke is throwing down this really fancy footwork. It looks like he's dancing on the air. So now he's doing a little bit of top rock. Nice, nice on the air. So now he's doing, he's doing a little bit of top rock. Nice, nice on the music.

This is Niels Rabitzky. He's this legendary B-boy who goes by the name of Storm. He was one of the judges at this competition and he's walking us through a video of it. Great control here, into a chair freeze. Very solid solo. After Taisuke, it's the other guy's turn. His name is Wing.

He's from South Korea. And this guy has a totally different style. Wing super stylish with his sweeps. Wing scrunches up his body into this kind of ball and starts spinning across the stage. Yeah, he looks like one of those turtle cells from Mario Kart. Here I go. This is a move that he came up with called Wing Mills, but he's only doing two rounds

because he's tired. Break dancing, or breaking as people in the scene call it, it's known for these big acrobatic power moves. But Storm says at the elite level, the game is really about creativity, about putting those power moves together in a way that surprises and delights people. If you want me to put it in a percentage or something like that, it definitely is more of an art form than it is a sport. This artistic side of breaking, how you tell a story with your body, that is what Storm

loves. What he hates is what's about to happen next. Man, I would not want to be a judge in this one. I would not want to be a judge in this one. So after a couple rounds going back and forth, the battle is finally over. Both the dancers, they're panting, and it's time for the judges to crown the winner. Three, two, one, hold them up! All at once, each judge holds up a sign with the name of one of the dancers. It's Wing, the guy from South Korea who's doing all those wing mills.

He wins the vote 3 to 2. Storm has judged hundreds of breaking contests over the years. And he says someone once asked him, like, what are the criteria here? What are these judges actually judging? And then I had to tell him. I was like, look, they just go either side. There is nothing. He was like, what?

Yeah, Storm's like, you just point to one side or the other. That is the traditional way you judge a breaking competition. There are no official criteria. Nobody's asking why, who, what made you decide. I mean, there was nothing transparent. No. Not at all. It's just like these guys won, these guys lost. That's it. This informal pointing system, it has always bothered Storm. Because if you don't know why someone won, how do you know it's fair?

And he wasn't the only one asking those questions. Several years ago, Storm was actually approached by a bunch of people working with the Olympics. They wanted to turn breaking into an Olympic sport. But in order for that to happen, they needed a better way to judge these battles. Something more clear, more objective. And Storm, well, he had some ideas.

Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jeff Quo. And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. For most of the things that people think of as sports, the winner is kind of obvious. It's the team that scores the most goals, or the person who crosses the finish line first. But then you've got all these sports in the Olympics, where the answer is a little more complicated.

Sports like gymnastics and figure skating, but also, more recently, skateboarding and surfing, and, new this year, breaking. Today on the show, Storm sets out to transform the way that breaking is judged without breaking the soul of the sport itself. New from embedded. Who gets to compete as a woman? This question came up in ugly form at the Paris Olympics. But it's not new.

If she runs like a man and talks like a man, is she a man? Hear about the long history of sex testing women athletes on Tested, a new series from CBC and NPR's Embedded podcast. This message comes from NPR sponsor Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. AI may be the most important new computer technology ever, but AI needs a lot of processing speed and that gets expensive fast. Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI.

OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash planet. Now, at the time Storm was approached by the Olympics, he'd actually been thinking for decades about a better way to judge breaking. And there was one person who he'd always bounce his ideas off of, a guy named Kevin Gopie, also known as DJ Renegade. When did you know that you two were going to be like, ideological soulmates?

It just happens. How'd you know when you fall in love with a girl or whatever, right? You don't know. One day you're hanging out, the next day you're like, I can't breathe when you're not around. Do you know? Storm and Renegade, they are legit celebrities in the world of breaking. They're both in their 50s now, they sort of look like Costco dads, but you know, like

Costco dads with swag. Storm is from Germany, Renegade grew up in the UK, his family's from Guyana. The two of them go way back. They met at a hip hop jam in Sweden in the 1990s. And back then, the scene was still pretty informal. Breaking had started out as a street dance in New York, and a lot of people still saw it as just another fad. But when Storm and Renegade looked at Breaking, they saw an art form. They would talk for hours and hours about technique, about philosophy, about innovation,

and how to get Breaking the respect it deserved. You know, like I was always working towards the goal that breaking would be more accepted generally, so that wherever I go when I tell people that I'm a breaker, I'm a breaker. You know, that they wouldn't look at me in a strange way and like, what do you mean? You know? Storm and Renegade realized that one way to really develop the scene was to focus on the battles. Battling is a big part of Breaking's culture.

Two dancers or two crews going head to head. Breaking at its core, its essence, is one-upmanship. It's a value system and it's based on ego. That competitive spirit is one of the driving forces behind breaking's evolution. These contests were where breakers would debut their freshest moves, push the art form forward. But the judging was not always up to par. I've seen judges turn up to events, right? And before the event starts, they tell you who's going to win.

What? Bro, it's madness out here you've no idea. Yeah there wasn't really any framework for judging so when breakers would lose a competition they wouldn't really get any feedback about how they could improve. But Storm and Renegade were thinking if you could make the judging more professional, more objective, then you could use these contests to supercharge the growth of breaking. So in 2013, they joined forces with some of the other leading figures on the scene. It was like this global summit of the elder statesmen of breaking. The G7 of dopeness. So it was this big table in a meeting room in a German hotel, right?

And the question on that table was, could you come up with a way to judge breaking that's more objective than just pointing to the winner? But in order to get there, they first had to agree on how to even define breaking. I asked them, look, give me everything you know about breaking and I write everything down. So we ended up with like 200 words on the flip chart,

creativity, charisma, style, strength, body control, dimension, variation, accentuation, musicality, coherence, improvisation. And then they started to debate what all these words really meant and which of them really mattered and which of them you could actually evaluate. So flavor, swagger, these are nonsense words, but you can't compare style. Yeah, yeah.

You just can't. It doesn't make sense, right? Because what you think is whack, I don't think is whack. So what you're trying to do is distill down what could be objective from what can't really. Yeah, it's called factor analysis. You start grouping words that mean the same thing, scratching the one that sounds ridiculous, like swagger, like what we're doing, you know? This debate actually goes on for months.

At some point, the Dope-ness summit moves to a Facebook group, where they are basically trying to figure out the essence, the soul, of breaking and put it into words. Over time, most of the other breakers kind of give up, move on to other things, leaving just Storm and Renegade to wrestle with this paradox. Because remember, breaking came out of hip-hop culture. What breakers value above all is doing something new, doing something your own way. You're speaking to a nonconformist. I don't want to function in the way other people want

me to function. No. My nature, and this is the breaker's nature, my nature goes, I'm going to show you that it's possible to do something that does not go with your standards. Yeah, it's about defying expectations, putting your unique spin on a move. So whatever system Storm and Renegade come up with, it has to leave room for that. So they take all those words people were talking about and they realize, we can group these all into three general categories. So category number one, physical. Which is like technique, athleticism, body control.

Category number two is artistic. How creative and fresh your performance is. And category number three is interpretation. Like how well you react to the music or how well you tell a story with your moves. And this becomes the basis for the new judging system. The way it works is each judge has an iPad and for each of the three categories there is a slider. During a head-to-head battle, the judges move those sliders toward whichever dancer is doing

better. They call this the three-fold system. They start testing it out at local breaking competitions, and they get a lot of good feedback from dancers and fans and even judges, where like, this is finally making things feel more legit. It was like magic, mate. I'm telling you. I think we discovered something really special.

Really, really did. Now around that time, in 2017, Storm and Renegade find out that the Olympics are interested in talking to them. Viewership of the Olympics had been declining, and the Olympics are interested in bringing on a new sport, a new event that might appeal to, you know, the youths. Storm and Renegade have mixed feelings about this. They're like, yeah, breaking could be a sport, but do we really want it to be a sport?

Is this really the way we want breaking to grow? Renegade says, think of the Olympic motto, faster, higher, stronger, together. That may be what the Olympics is about, but it's not really what breaking is about. Instead of like stronger, higher, faster, it's like dope, or, uh, I don't know, you know, like, yeah, like when you feel the drum and you hear the drum, this

like, it's a chance, it's a flow state. It's, it's, it's not like a normal sport. But then again, they're also like, this is a huge opportunity to show the world who we are. Represent our culture, right? Represent the values of it, right? Educate people on what it is that we do. And also, it'd help bring in money from funders, corporate sponsors and governments who would support these athletes. So many breakers, they were coming to me saying, this is a great opportunity.

Saying, Storm, basically like, you always wanted us to become professionals, so don't you think that we should tackle this right? You know, like, why don't you just give it a try? So, Storm takes a trip to Switzerland to talk to all these bigwigs from the World Dance Sport Federation and the International Olympic Committee, the IOC, to discuss how to make breaking into a sport.

One guy from the IOC was asking me whether I think that that breaking is ready for a change, because now this art form is becoming a sport. Certain changes might probably have to be made. Because when you are judging an Olympic sport, it's not just about making things clear for the athletes or the judges, it's also about the audience. Making sure the audience can understand why this person got gold and this person got silver. At one point, someone suggests, if you really want to be super objective and fair, here's how you do it.

Just assign points to every trick that a b-boy or b-girl does. Maybe it's like four points for an air flare and eight points for a headspin. But Storm and Renegade? They're like, oh no, no, no. Absolutely not. That is exactly what we want to avoid. Imagine, if you just went by points, all our beautiful creative battles would just devolve into like two dudes seeing who could

do the most head spins. We're not trying to get the highest points to like, no, what are you talking about? That's not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to express ourselves. And to their credit, the organizers back down. They just have one request. This threefold system with the three categories that Storm and Renegade designed, it's still a little too loose. I remember that he was saying, well, he said we need, we need a system with a minimum of five criteria. I remember him saying that. I was like, yeah, it's all right. I said, no problem. So Storm and Renegade turned the three categories

into six categories. And with that, the IOC decides it's gonna try out this system at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires. Storm and Renegade agree to serve as the head judges. And when the day of the finals comes, the crowd is overflowing. It's the most hyped event of the Youth Olympics. Me and Nils are observing and we're watching some cool breaking.

And Thomas Bach, the fucking president of the IOC, is sitting on the floor. I'm like, yo, what is going on? Do you know? Renegade says that is the moment he knew that breaking was on its way to becoming an official Olympic sport. Storm and Renegade had started out on a quest to make breaking contests a little more fair and objective. And now they'd managed to break into the Olympics, more or less on their own terms, with a judging system that they hoped would not compromise the thing that

made breaking so special. The current judging system for Olympic breaking is a little different, but it's mostly based on what Storm and Renegade came up with. But you know, some of the most popular Olympic sports have gone on a very similar journey, trying to balance the artistic and the athletic in their judging systems. Over time, they found that to be a really tricky balance. That is after the break. Okay, so tell me if this sounds like you. You love NPR's podcasts, you wish they weren't interrupted by sponsor breaks like this one, and you want to support NPR's mission of creating a more informed public. If this does sound like you, then

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Follow the It's Been A on this really wide spectrum. If you look at all the artistic, subjective type sports at the Olympics, the judging systems actually fall on this really wide spectrum. On one side, you have these loose, holistic judging systems, like what Storm and Renegade designed for breaking, where judges are rating athletes based on an overall impression, like a vibe. A lot of the newer Olympic events, like BMX, skateboarding, surfing, they all tend to operate this way. On the other side of the spectrum, you have sports with rigid points systems, like gymnastics, where every skill and every deduction is classified and diagrammed in this 100 page manual. This comprehensive points system is exactly what Storm and Renegade did not want for breaking.

But what's interesting is that some sports have tried to split the difference. One Olympic event that's gone through a major revolution in judging recently is artistic swimming. Used to be called synchronized swimming. If you've never watched it before, it's kind of like the mullet of sports. It's beautiful and refined on top and just absolute chaos and violence under the water.

Do people often ask you, like, how is this a sport? What about this makes it a sport? Every single person who's ever tried it has never asked that question again, and they've often said it's the hardest thing they've ever done. Cheryl Russell is one of the judges for artistic swimming at the Olympics this year. And for a long time, the way they judged the sport was kind of like how they currently judge breaking. It was holistic. It was based on an overall impression. The swimmers would get a score out of 10 for the technical stuff, like difficulty and execution,

and a score out of 10 for the artistic stuff, like choreography, music interpretation, and also how effortless everything looked. Part of what you're aiming for is an ease of performance. We're talking about how hard everything is, but when you look at them, they're not huffing and puffing until the routine's over. Then you see how hard they're breathing. They're trying to make everything look very easy. Now, this loose, flexible system, it worked fine for a while.

But over the years, Cheryl says, you started to hear more and more complaints. Here's something that would happen fairly often. One country would come in with a really difficult routine, but they would make a major mistake, like completely flop on a skill. Sometimes that country would still place higher than another country that had an easier routine, but nailed it. It was hard to justify that, especially for people watching.

They'd say, well, they messed that up. How did they get third place when this country didn't mess anything up? There was also this sense of stagnation in the sport, like the same teams would win over and over again, which all led to a lot of pressure from coaches, from the athletes themselves, even from the Olympic committee, to make the judging more transparent, more objective. So a couple of years ago, artistic swimming completely overhauled their judging system. The new system which made its Olympics debut this year is now partly based on, you guessed it, points.

One of the world's experts on these points-based judging systems is Elliot Schwartz. He's an analytics guy, got a PhD from MIT, and he has maybe one of the coolest jobs in the world. When people ask me, I mean, the easiest way I try to explain it to them is like, have you read or seen the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt? Yeah. And if they say yes, then I say I do Moneyball for the Olympics. And you're the Brad Pitt. Yeah, I'm Brad Pitt, right. No, I'm Jonah Hill.

Elliott works for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and basically what he does is he helps coaches and athletes make sense of these complicated judging systems, figure out how to maximize their points. And when Elliott heard about Artistic Swimming's new judging system, he thought, it is time to optimize this sport. He immediately reached out. And I said, I think I can help USA Artistic Swimming because I saw what happened in the early days of the international judging system that was implemented in figure skating. Basically what figure skating did in 2004 was it created a hybrid judging system.

They split the sport down the middle. On the technical side of things, they tried to quantify as much as they could. There's now this giant rulebook that says, you know, a triple axel gets 8 points and a quadruple axel gets 12.5 points. But figure skating also kept an artistic score, which is still based on a judge's holistic overall impression. This artistic score, in theory, is supposed to count for about half your total. A lot of work was done with the mathematical factors to try to make sure that they'd be

roughly balanced, right? Roughly 50-50. Because that was the desired proportion to make sure that artistry was sufficiently important. But in practice that is not exactly what happened. What skaters have found is that because the artistry score is still so subjective it was harder to stand out on the artistry side and you couldn't really count on those points to get ahead. Whereas if you attempt a big skill and land it well no one can really deny you those points to get ahead. Whereas if you attempt a big skill and land it well, no one can really deny you those points.

And in theory, there's no limit to the number of points you can get by doing harder and harder skills. And as a result, figure skating has gotten totally jump-obsessed in recent years. Some of the athletes started to perform such difficult jumps, so quadruple jumps, and more and more difficult quadruple jumps, that athletes were earning more points from technical elements than they could ever earn from artistic impression.

This is where Elliott comes in. A big part of his job is using data from these points systems to help athletes strategize about which skills to work on. In figure skating, it's not always about jumps. Case in point, the figure skater Nathan Chen. So there was a point as Nathan was working toward, you know, his goal of winning the Olympics in 2022, where Nathan was spending a lot of time on jumps

and very successfully, but not earning as many points on spins as he was capable of earning. Elliott looked at the data and he pointed out to Nathan's team that if he just spent a little bit more time practicing spins instead of jumps, he could pick up a lot of easy points. So basically what you were saying to him was, like, hey, Nathan, there's a great arbitrage opportunity here. Way to use that NBA, Jeff. Very well translated.

Yes. Absolutely. OK, full disclosure, I don't actually have an NBA. Neither do I. But we do love arbitrage. It's true. Now, artistic swimming's new judging system, it's very similar to figure skating. So, Elliott's main advice to the US team was,

you'll probably get a lot more bang for your buck if you prioritize landing difficult skills over this more subjective artistry stuff. In fact, a lot of teams in artistic swimming are now chasing difficulty these days. And Cheryl, the artistic swimming judge, says, yeah, the artistry has suffered a little bit. This year at the World Championships, one swimmer literally just did the same super difficult skill over and over and over and won bronze. And they're like, okay, we got to make some adjustments because we can't have, you know,

a team doing the same thing seven times in a row. So they have changed it a little bit. You know, it's not really that artistic swimming or figure skating are trying to emphasize the technical over the creative. It's just that if you're an athlete going for the technical stuff, it's more of a sure shot. So with these hybrid judging systems, you kind of wonder if the creative stuff is always going to be at a disadvantage.

But Cheryl, who in some ways is very old school, she's been judging for decades and really believes in the artistic side of the sport, she actually loves the new judging system. Yeah, she says it's kind of reignited something in the sport. Teams seem to be working a lot harder now. This new obsession with difficulty has made everything a lot more exciting to watch. You see underdog teams now putting up big scores. Like last year, a team from Israel took gold at the European Championships.

Cheryl says that's never happened before. And the US was back on the podium. And we hadn't been on the podium since the Greek Olympics. Well, the 2004, not the ancient ones. No, not those. We didn't have any naked wrestlers, no. Seeing what happened to artistic swimming kind of makes you realize that the goal of these judging systems is not just about being objective.

It's about motivating athletes to push the limits. That's kind of what it means to be a sport. And that's part of what breaking is about too. The competitive side of breaking, the culture of battling and one-upsmanship, that's what caused breaking to become so thrilling that the Olympics is now putting it on a podium. But it also seems like the longer that something's an Olympic sport, the harder it is to hold on to the artistic, creative side of it. Storm says he's excited that so many people

are gonna be introduced to breaking in Paris, but he knows that what they're seeing is only a narrow slice of what breaking actually is. What I'm worried about still is that something overshadows every other aspect so much that now, in a broader sense sense people would only see this one thing. This could happen with the Olympics. It could happen that from one day to another after the Olympics in Paris that everybody thinks now,

okay, breaking is this. And they only see battles. And that's all breaking is about. When it's so much more. Of course. This episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Jenny Lott. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez with help from James Willits and Sina LaFreda.

Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Jeff Guo. And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. They're all over the internet and bumping out of people's cars. They're the songs of the summer. And this year includes the domination of Charli XCX and Brat Summer.

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