While watching a break battle at the Silverback Open outside Philadelphia in 2017, a b-boy was doing a handstand. While it was a basic element, the dancer had modified the handstand by balancing on the back of his wrist, an innovation that excited the crowd around him. password.
As I settled back in, I remember thinking, how do you score unexpected wrist movements or other spontaneous expressions of creativity? The problem felt urgent because of recent developments at the time.
Just over a year ago, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that breaking would be added to the 2018 Youth Olympic Games (YOG). The event is often used as a testing ground for new Olympic sports, such as 3-on-3 basketball. If breaking had done well in Buenos Aires, it would have had a good chance of making it to the Olympic roster for all age groups. And it did, so breaking made its debut in Paris.
The IOC chose the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF) to guide the dance along the Olympic trajectory, an interesting choice given that it had no previous relationship with breakdancing or the community that created it. Best known for its global ballroom dance competitions, WDSF took about two years to prepare breakdancing for its YOG debut. That also meant it took another two years to develop and implement an IOC-approved judging system.
In most duels, especially in smaller ones, judging is a low-tech affair. There are an odd number of judges, and after everyone has completed their round (the number usually varies depending on the stage of the duel), the judges usually point with their fingers and vote for who they think has won. Occasionally, one of the judges will cross his arms to make an X to indicate that the two dancers feel they are tied. This means that they have to expend more energy (and perhaps some moves that they would have saved for the next duel) to play another round, allowing the undecided judge to choose a side.
These votes are not based on hard and fast rules. In fact, traditionally there was no rulebook at all. While there is general agreement on some things, such as biting another B-boy’s moves (don’t do it), touching your opponent (also don’t do it), or dancing to the beat (if possible, definitely do it), judges generally evaluate dancers based on values that break with tradition: creativity, style, personality, and musicality. It’s up to each judge, usually a dancer or former dancer, to decide how they will weigh the different values in their decisions.
This won’t work at the Olympics.
Luckily for the WDSF, years before the IOC got its hands on breaking, community members had already begun building a judging system to use at major events like Battle of the Year. B-boys Niels “Storm” Robitsky, Kevin “Renegade” Gopie, and 8.dance founder Dominik Fahr, along with a handful of others, developed a unified, consistent approach to judging breaking over the years, and Fahr developed the platform and technology to put it into practice. After the YOG announcement, they worked with the WDSF to fine-tune the approach, which was used at the 2018 YOG. In 2022, Gopie, Robitsky, and Fahr ended their collaboration with the WDSF. After they left, the WDSF developed what they call an Olympic judging system, but it didn’t reinvent the wheel. The system that will be used in Paris is an alternate version of what Gopie, Robitsky, and Fahr created.
