Is it an art form or a sport? Are they dancers or athletes?
Either way, almost exactly a year to the day before breaking makes its debut as the newest Olympic sport, competitors will gather in London this weekend to battle for the title of UK champion.
B-Boys and B-Girls – the name by which performers are known – will break out their best corkscrews and pretzels, propellor kicks and six-steps, hoping to win a place in October’s World Final, to be held at the Roland-Garros tennis stadium in Paris.
The thoughts of many, though, will be on another Paris competition. The International Olympic Committee, keen to make the Games “more gender balanced, more youthful and more urban”, announced three years ago that breaking would be included in the Olympic programme at Paris 2024, four years after surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing made their own youth-friendly debuts in Tokyo.
For some, the opportunity to showcase breaking on the Olympic stage – the term “breakdancing” is only really used by the media, says competitor Connor Gribben – is a huge opportunity.
“Personally I would love to represent my country, my family, my friends, my crew, in anything that I do,” says Gribben,27, from South Shields, “so I feel like that’s something I would love to share with the world.”
But there is an undoubted ambivalence within the scene to breaking’s move away from its rich underground history and into the clutches of the IOC.
Breaking originated in New York in the 1970s, evolving out of battles for territory between rival street gangs. It made its Olympic debut at the 2018 Summer Youth Games in Buenos Aires, where the IOC judged it an outstanding success. Male and female contests will be staged in an arena on Place de la Concorde on 9 and 10 August next year.
“There are definitely some people out there who have mixed feelings about the Olympics,” says Jackson Watson, who will be defending his UK title.
“That’s completely fair – it happened with skateboarding when skateboarding [was introduced to] the Olympics. But at the end of the day, it’s another chance to educate people who don’t know about breaking. Just because it’s in the Olympics, and it’s in the limelight, that doesn’t take anything away from its history and the culture.
“Breaking is such a cultural thing, and it’s got such a rich history. It came from poverty, it was started by kids in New York who didn’t have a lot. And without sounding too cheesy, to go from the streets to the Olympics is actually quite a mad story, I think.”
In June, B-Boys Sunni and Kid Karam became the first two breakers to compete for Team GB, in the squad’s debut at the European championships. In November, UK Sport awarded a squad of seven leading breakers £135,000 to help their preparation for Paris.
“This is just the beginning of a journey of development and growth for our sport,” said the Breaking GB president, Oliver “Hooch” Whittle, at the time.
Watson, also 27, who competes alongside Gribz in the Battalions crew, says he first got into the sport as a child, inspired by his father’s love of 1980s and 90s dance movies, and the Playstation game B-Boy The Game.
He is successful enough to do it professionally, he says, “but it’s definitely a tough, tough way to make a living, I’ll admit that. But I’m pushing through and persevering with it.”
Gribbens agrees. “It’s really difficult for any artist to make this a full-time career. So a lot of what we do is just purely because it does so much for us, and we love it.”
Unusually for national championships, this weekend’s qualifying rounds are open to all comers over the age of 18; eight B-Boys and four B-Girls will win the right to battle against the same number of pre-invited competitors on the second day of competition for the national titles.
