News

Only in Olympic Breakdancing Do We Get a Lithuanian Girl Wearing a Durag

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Aug 9th, 2024 · 11:47 AM EDT

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This is the first year that breakdancing is an Olympic sport:

Olympic breakdancing… c’mon this not a sport, this isn’t anything except turbo cringe 😬 pic.twitter.com/Vw1RFTRgI4

— CryptoBeesKnees 🐝💯 (@TheBigBeesKnees) August 9, 2024

Nah This Some Bullshit . You Can Get A medal For This? #BreakingForGold #BreakDancing #Olympics https://t.co/0iX2JBJhTb pic.twitter.com/oZGGftY69D

— Jeune Roi Noir (@kronSAYS) August 9, 2024

1. Breakdancing at the Olympics is already amazing simply for the visual of seeing somebody from Lithuania in a durag
2. The announcers gotta be reaaaaallllll careful pronouncing that name 😂 pic.twitter.com/Ro6XW9vbLL

— Maxx aka Humphrey Frogart aka Maxxel Rose (@MaxxFuller) August 9, 2024

Shout out to the 17-year-old Lithuanian girl named “Nicka” with the durag. Is she allowed to wear that? We’ll have to ask Dr. Umar. Nonetheless, her performance was pretty sick.

The tweets above are critical, but it seems like the people speaking positively about this are doing so from a “hip hop getting respect on the global stage” angle. Ice-T went on Elon Musk’s social media platform to say “This is gonna blow the minds of people that haven’t seen breaking in a while… INCREDIBLE All Respect to HIPHOP.” That’s cool, and nobody is going to dismiss that opinion, but the question is whether or not this needs to be an Olympic sport. This is a dance battle. This is the “you got served” South Park episode now elevated to the same stage that Katie Ledecky and Nikola Jokic perform on. Is it competitive? Sure. Does it require more athletic skill than dressage and shooting, featuring the Turkish guy who showed up wearing only eyeglasses? Yeah, sure. But that’s not the question. The question is if it’s a “sport.” A lot of people would probably describe this as subjective art. Gymnasts compete in a breakdancing-adjacent floor routine, right? So in that sense, it’s very similar, but at the same time, ballroom dancing is not an Olympic sport while ice dancing is. So, regardless of your individual opinion on breakdancing, it does make you wonder how the decision makers are categorizing these various events and why some are Olympic sports and others are not. There’s a thin line separating art, dance, and sport these days.