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Arts|Breaking’s Big Year That Wasn’t
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/28/arts/breaking-olympics-raygun.html
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It was a 50-year journey from the streets of New York to the Paris Olympic Games. But a would-be celebration turned into something of a debacle.
Published Dec. 28, 2024Updated Dec. 30, 2024, 9:27 a.m. ET
Ken Swift has never dribbled a basketball to a beat. Growing up in the Bronx, he never darted for touchdowns while music thumped. Back then, in the late 1970s, sports plugged an important desire for sweat and competition.
Breaking filled a larger, more meaningful one.
“Sports have a structure,” Swift said during a recent phone interview. “Breaking, because it was new and just born, there was so much freedom to it. You could give things your own name on it. You could exist in a community and build your reputation and get props.”
Swift is one of breaking’s bricklayers. As a member of the Rock Steady Crew, he was an innovator, inventing many of the moves that are touchstones of the new dance that was born as hip-hop emerged from New York City half a century ago.
He was cleareyed over the decades as breaking made its way from those streets all the way to the Olympic Games in Paris this summer. Is it one of hip-hop’s foundational elements? Indisputably. A valued form of expression? Indeed. An art form? Absolutely.
A sport? Never.
His stance appears to be validated in the aftermath of breaking’s inclusion at the Games, a grand-opening, grand-closing moment for hip-hop.
Beyond music insiders or Olympic aficionados, most people would struggle to recall that Canada’s Philip Kim captured breaking’s B-boy gold medal or that Japan’s Ami Yuasa triumphed among B-girls.
