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.
Instead, the lasting impression of breaking’s Olympics moment came courtesy of a whimsical performance by Australia’s Dr. Rachael Gunn, known as B-girl Raygun. She flopped, jerked and sprawled during her Paris rounds. At one point, she mimicked a hopping kangaroo, creating one of the lasting images of the Games. She scored zero points.
The showing spurred late-night jokes, countless memes, inspiration for Halloween costumes and an interception celebration.
Conspiracy theories over how Gunn qualified for the Olympics spread as quickly as the memes. A Change.org petition argued she manipulated the process to make the Olympics. The Australian Olympic Committee was forced to publicly defend the process that resulted in Gunn qualifying for Paris.
Gunn, a university lecturer at Macquarie University Faculty of Arts, described the criticism she received during a post-Olympics interview with Australia’s Channel 10 TV.
“It was really sad how much hate that it did evoke,” she said. “And a lot of the responses is also just due to people not being very familiar with breaking and the diversity of approaches in breaking.”
Michael Holman is well familiar. He envisioned breaking as an Olympic sport 40 years ago. The founder of the influential New York City Breakers, he submitted a proclamation for breaking’s Olympic inclusion before the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. He imagined the merging of the dance’s athletic nature and artistry as a natural fit.
As the 2024 Games approached, Holman debated with Swift, his longtime friend, about whether breaking’s big moment on the international stage would be a success. Holman felt good; Swift was pessimistic.
Now, months after witnessing what happened, Holman concedes that Swift may have been right along. Holman’s disappointment oozed through during a phone interview.
“Imagine somebody somehow bamboozles officials, sneaks into the Olympics and gets to race at the finals of the 100-meter race of track and field and instead of running, hops in a potato sack as performance art,” Holman said.
“I wish Raygun, when she did that silly thing and that mockery at least had done it for a cause, to bring attention to something,” he added. “It was performance art for one person, and it was a real slap in the face.”
The late-night hosts had mostly moved on by September, when the World DanceSport Federation, breaking’s governing body, announced its post-Olympic rankings.
Somehow, Raygun outpaced all other B-girls; she was the No. 1 breaker in the world. The list included events over the previous year. Olympic qualifying events and the Olympics themselves did not factor into the statistics. So, Raygun’s blank Olympic scores did not affect her world standing.
In November, Raygun announced her retirement from competitive breaking during an interview on an Australian radio station.
“I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems really difficult for me to do now to approach a battle,” she told 2DayFM’s “The Jimmy & Nath Show.”
While Swift never viewed breaking as a sport, he laments a moment lost. He mentored some of the Olympic participants. Breaking has evolved greatly since he spun on cardboard in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Today’s B-boys and B-girls are more diverse, athletic and powerful than ever.
Dominika Banevic, a 17-year-old Lithuanian known as B-Girl Nicka, won a silver medal with an eye-popping array of moves. Victor Montalvo, a second-generation breaker known as B-Boy Victor, won a bronze medal for the United States with a dynamic performance.
The variety and depth of talent displayed in Paris would not have been possible without the reach and expansion of hip-hop first imagined by New York kids like Swift.
“All that got overlooked and we got laughed at,” Swift said. “Like in the ’80s, they laughed at it. ‘Oh, look at the Black and Latino kids bouncing around. It’s not a dance.’ Until we really grasped the situation and stand up for it, it’s going to continue.”
He isn’t condemning Raygun. Breaking is an expression of individualism, an explosion of personality. She, Swift said, rightly expressed hers.
Each country’s Olympic hosting organization committee dreams up its own vision. In 2028, Los Angeles will host the Olympics for the first time since Holman imagined breaking as a sport.
The 2028 program will feature sports like lacrosse, cricket, squash and flag football. Breaking will not be included, despite the city’s rich hip-hop history. The decision was made far before Raygun’s arrival onto the international stage.
Some bemoan that rap, a component of hip-hop, turned overly commercial on its march toward extreme popularity. Swift hopes the same does not occur with breaking.
“We’re making the same mistakes in our culture,” he said. “We’re allowing the appropriation, the exportation. We’re trying to fix it for everybody else except for ourselves.”
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