Back in 2017, when I was watching the breaking battles at the Silverback Open in the suburbs of Philadelphia, a B-boy drew up into a handstand. It’s a basic element, to be sure, but this dancer tweaked it by balancing on the back of his wrists, an innovation that excited the crowd surrounding the cypher.
As I settled back down, I remember thinking, how the hell do you score that, an unexpected flip of the wrist, or any of the other spontaneous displays of creativity? The matter felt pressing because of then-recent developments.
Just a year earlier, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had announced that breaking was being added to the roster for the 2018 Youth Olympic Games (YOG), an event often used as a testing ground for new Olympic disciplines, such as 3-on-3 basketball. If breaking did well in Buenos Aires, there was a good chance that it would make the roster for all-ages Olympic Games. And it did do well, which is why breaking makes its debut in Paris.
The IOC selected the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF) to shepherd the dance along its Olympic trajectory, an interesting choice given that it had no prior relationship with breaking or the community that created it. The WDSF, best known for being in charge of global ballroom dance competition, had about two years to get breaking ready for its YOG debut. This meant they also had two years to develop and implement an IOC-approved judging system.
At most battles, especially the smaller ones, the judging is a low-tech affair. There’s an odd number of judges and after everyone is done with their rounds—how many usually depends on the stage of the battle—the judges vote for the person they think won, usually by pointing. Sometimes one of the judges will cross his arms in an X to signify that he feels that the two dancers have tied. This means that they have to do another round, burning through more energy (and perhaps some moves they might’ve been saving for a later bout) so that the undecided judge can pick a side.
These votes aren’t based on any hard and fast rules; in fact, traditionally, there’s been no rulebook at all. While there is a general consensus about some things, such as biting another B-boy’s moves (don’t do it) or touching your opponent (also don’t do it) or dancing on beat (definitely do that if you possibly can), the judges are usually evaluating the dancers according to the values of the breaking tradition—creativity, style, character, and musicality. It’s up to each individual judge, usually dancers or former dancers, how to weigh the different values in their decision.
This probably wasn’t going to cut it at the Olympics.
Fortunately for the WDSF, several years before the IOC’s foray into breaking, members of the community had already started building a judging system to be used at major events such as Battle of the Year. B-boy Niels “Storm” Robitsky, Kevin “Renegade” Gopie, and Dominik Fahr, founder of and8.dance, along with a handful of others, had spent years developing a unified, consistent approach to evaluating breaking, with Fahr developing the platform and technology to put it into action. After the YOG announcement, they partnered with the WDSF to fine-tune their approach, which was used at the 2018 YOG. In 2022, Gopie, Robitsky, and Fahr stopped working with the WDSF. Since their departure, the WDSF developed what they’ve called the Olympic judging system, but they didn’t reinvent the wheel. The system that will be used in Paris is an alternate version of what Gopie, Robitsky, and Fahr had created.
First, it’s important to make clear what this system is not: It is not points-based. Breaking skills have not been assigned values that are then tallied up after the dancers’ rounds are complete. The judges won’t be throwing out 10s or 9.9s as they used to do in elite gymnastics. This is not how you win battles in an underground event, and it’s not how the dancers are going to win at the Olympics, either.
This was not to the liking of WDSF officials at first, according to Fahr. “During the Youth Olympics preparation, we had to fight so much against [a] point system,” he says. He uses the example of a windmill, a fairly ubiquitous power move that can be done in a multitude of ways. “We said, ‘Define the perfect windmill.’” If you can’t describe the platonic ideal of the element, you’ll be hard pressed to assign any kind of value to it. You’d also have to be able to answer extremely specific questions that by their nature have no definitive answer: How many revolutions must a dancer do to receive credit for the element? What if you only intended to do a couple by way of transitioning into footwork or some other moves? Does this truncated windmill sequence have any point value?
Robinsky, who's been dancing and judging since the 1980s, views battles as a kind of debate or argument between the two competitors. In this debate, the windmill—or any other element—is akin to a word. You can use it if it serves your ends and if you know how to wield it, but you can also use other words if those get your point across better. “Somebody like Menno or Phil Wizard,” he says, “I’ve never seen them do a windmill and yet they are two of the best breakers in the world.” (Both Menno and Phil Wizard, representing the Netherlands and Canada respectively, will be battling in Paris.)
Even a dancer who does routinely perform windmills might not opt to do it against a particular opponent. “I know that Pocket’s windmill is way better than mine and I would never do a windmill [against him] because in that argument, he’s already won,” says Robitsky. (Pocket is a B-boy from South Korea who performs an astounding variety of power moves phenomenally well.) “I would do things where I know … that Pocket cannot cope.”
If you had a point system or very specific requirements, you couldn’t strategize the way that Robitsky describes. The B-boy who did more within the 60-second time limit would win almost every time. Assigning point values would also make it inevitable that the more acrobatic elements of the dance—the ones that drew the IOC’s attention in the first place—would get prioritized ahead of the subtler yet crucial components of breaking, such as toprock and footwork. (Toprock is the part of breaking that is done upright and usually where the B-boy shows off more traditional “dance” moves, and is also an opportunity to showcase one’s style and character. Footwork refers to the floor-based moves, but not the acrobatic ones.)
“What are we? Are we dancers? Are we artists? Are we gymnasts?” asks Gopie.
The answer is, of course, dancers, even if breaking being introduced to the Games has meant that the B-boys and B-girls are now sometimes referred to as athletes. But the fact that breaking is, first and foremost, a dance is something that everyone I spoke with insisted on. A B-boy I once knew back when I was a thoroughly mediocre B-girl in my twenties told me that he didn’t do power because he believed that he could win solely through his sharp footwork, creative toprock, and overall style. And he did win battles that way, because those things are highly valued by the breaking community. I joked to him that he brought a knife to a gunfight, and won with the knife. In a points-based system, that would be a lot harder.
So points were out. What Robitsky and Gopie arrived at was a comparative judging approach that looks not for individual skills, but how well the dancer performs against their opponent. And they did this by identifying broad categories of criteria, based on breaking’s own principles.
“There is no perfect round,” Gopie says. “There’s only a round better than someone else’s. Or worse than someone else’s.”
The number of evaluative groupings has changed over the years. Robitsky and Gopie settled on three, encompassing six values, which they called the Trivium System. In the current version, it’s down to five: technique, vocabulary, originality, execution, and musicality.
These are not entirely distinct categories. A fall could negatively impact execution and possibly technique. Biting another dancer’s moves would do the same to originality. Vocabulary is impacted by the variety of moves that you show and this can overlap with originality, especially if some of those moves go beyond foundation into something wholly new. An explosive air flare can demonstrate a mastery of technique but, if timed well to the beat, could also display musicality.
Each of the five criteria are listed out on a judging tablet and underneath each one is a slider, which is set to dead center to start the battle. To the right of the fader is blue and to the left is red. During a battle, one dancer will be assigned red, the other blue. One dancer goes out into the cypher and then the other responds, with the judges—nine at the Olympics—nudging the sliders for each criteria one way or the other. There are also buttons for things like “misbehavior,” which can range from accidentally touching the opposing dancer to using a lewd gesture, something you see frequently in smaller jams. (Misbehaviors can, in some cases, lead to disqualification.)
“When both of them enter the dance floor, they're equal,” Fahr says of the two B-boys at the start of the battle. While a judge might be aware of the dancer’s repertoire, they don’t know which moves they’re going to pull out of their bag and how they’re going to put them all together.
This is why Candy Bloise, a B-girl from New York and a certified judge who has worked at the Olympic qualifying events, said she usually doesn’t move the sliders during the first B-girl’s round—there isn’t yet a performance to compare it to. There is no absolute value to anything the first B-girl is doing. The picture of who is better only starts to come into focus when the second dancer begins her set.
“When you start to learn how to use this system, you’re looking for imbalances,” she says. She compares it to a balancing toy. “When you’re a kid and they give you the little cubes, 10 on one side and 10 on the other, and then they’re like ‘Take off one cube,’ and the scale kind of goes down—it’s kind of like that with breaking and battling,” she says.”You’ll get a big cube for the air flare, but then this guy’s got three cubes because he’s danced way more than you have.”
And sometimes, in the right hands, the dancing and foundation cubes can outweigh the power cubes. “If you look at someone like Jeffro, I’ve seen him do a full round with absolutely no power and win,” she said of Jeffrey “Jeffro” Louis, one of the two qualified US men in the competition.
The judges evaluate each round separately as opposed to simply voting on who they think won the battle after all the rounds are complete. It’s a sum of the parts being greater than the whole kind of deal. This approach addresses the problem of recency bias, an issue in a lot of battles. (And in women’s college gymnastics, where a stuck dismount seems to make the judges forget form errors throughout the exercise.) The judges nudge the sliders for the five criteria in either direction, either by a lot or little, depending on how they measure up against their opponent. The dancer can get the judge’s vote in a squeaker or by a landslide. “Red side can beat the blue side by 2 percent or by 33 percent,” Richard “Rich Nyce” Marshall, who is on the Breaking For Gold USA Dance Council, explained. You win a round by getting a majority of votes from the judging panel; you win the battle by winning more rounds than your opponent. (The exception to this is the round robin stage, where the number of rounds won overall will determine whether you get to the 1v1 battle stage of the competition.)
Beyond the system itself, there is oversight of the judges, all of whom have been certified. Victor “Kid Glyde” Alicea, son of B-boy Glyde of the legendary Dynamic Rockers crew, evaluates judging performance for the WDSF. He describes the process of checking the judges’ work to try to make sure it’s unbiased. “One easy way to do that is if the other eight judges have voted for the other side, for other dancers or athletes … we do question the judge,” he says. He also notes that they review the judging after major events. This is similar to other judged sports like gymnastics, which reviews the judges’ work after big competitions and also takes note of judges whose marks fall “out of range.”
It’s good to have a check on the judges, but none of this changes the subjectivity of it all— which some will view as anathema to sports. But even in the Olympics and outside its usual context, breaking remains an art form. The system that has been created to judge it doesn’t exist to tell the B-boys and B-girls what to do. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
What ultimately matters, though, is the dance. Bloise, who will be doing TV commentary during the Games, says that a lay viewer who might be watching breaking for the first time outside of a teen dance movie should focus on a way of moving. “You want to look at someone who’s interpreting the music, but also is able to freely move their body in a dynamic and artistic way,” she says. The experience she describes feels more akin to appreciating art than watching sports. And perhaps that’s as it should be.
Correction: 8/9/2024, 9:13 am EST: The country Menno will be representing has been corrected.
