The International Olympic Committee on Monday approved breakdancing — or breaking, as the IOC would have you call it — for the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, and for those who remember the spring and summer of 1983, when all the girls had leg warmers and knee warmers, yes, even in the midst of summer, and massive hair and huge shoulder pads and all of us were frosted and perfect, let’s all sing together to Irene Cara and Flashdance. Don’t be shy. You know the words:
What a feeling
Bein's believin'
I can have it all
Now I'm dancing for my life
…
Take your passion
And make it happen
Pictures come alive
You can dance right through your life
Since this is now formally the most camp program ever staged — surfing will be in Tahiti, 9,000 miles away — here’s an Idea for the first celebrity judging panel for “breaking” at the Paris Games: senior IOC members John Coates of Australia and Anita DeFrantz of the United States and the IOC’s ethics director, Paquerette Girard Zappelli. The Paris people could style it as, say, “The IOC’s Got Talent,” with the celebrity judges holding up flashcards like in the old days when a 6.0 won you figure skating. Let’s go from camp to high camp!
And why not? When you say the words “breakdancing” and “Olympics” in front of a mirror, you can’t even keep a straight face. That’s why the IOC invented the non-word ‘breaking.” This whole thing is like a bad outtake from the classic Aussie movie Muriel’s Wedding (1994 reference, as we are still working the wayback machine).
The IOC thought it was taking several cool steps forward Monday by confirming for 2024 the addition of breaking, along with skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing.
No.
Breakdancing at the 2019 World Urban Games in Budapest
As one of the very few journalists who has actually seen a breaking competition in person — in September 2019, at the World Urban Games, in Budapest — the truth is that it is indeed interesting. But the scoring (not a 6.0-style BTW) is opaque. And the real problem is that breaking is not 2020 urban. After the 2018 Youth Games in Buenos Aires, the IOC abruptly got “urban” religion, as if making everything “urban” would make for a solution to its real problem, which is being relevant, especially with teens and 20-somethings. Breakdancing is 1983 urban, or 1977.
To show you how 1977 it is, USA Today, which obviously had this feature ready to go as soon as the IOC decision was confirmed, ran a feature Monday that centered on a dude named Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón, who — it reported — “started breaking [not a word, and especially then] as a kid in the Bronx in 1977, at the dawn of hip hop, before the musical genre even had its name.”
Mr. Colón, USA Today dutifully reported, is now 54.
As even 26-year-old Victor Montalvo, whose nom de dance is simply Victor, also told USA Today, “Back in the Bronx, when it first started, it was always neighborhoods of kids just battling each other. That’s how they did it back in the day. Now it’s big-stage competitions and people flying all over the world, battling the best of the best.”
You want to know why breaking is now in the Olympics?
Other wanna-be sports — hello, pole dancing, oops, sorry, that’s never gonna happen but continuing with the camp theme — must be going berserk.
Breakdancing hasn’t even been a regular at any continental Games.
So why? Because it made a splash at the 2018 Youth Games. And because the secretary-general of the World DanceSport Federation is a guy named Guillaume Felli. His dad, Gilbert, was for years the IOC’s super-solid executive director of the Olympic Games.
Good effort by Felli the younger and the WDSF. For real. This is how the Olympics works. On relationships.
Meantime, the shallow media focus Monday worldwide on breakdancing — kudos to the IOC, for once, for easy manipulation of the herd — totally misses the reckoning that’s coming.
Indeed, the reckoning that is desperately needed.
Lost in the nonsense over idiocy like new fun terms like “b-boys” and “b-girls” is this:
The Olympic Games are a huge monstrosity that needs to go on a financial and logistical Weight Watchers. Paris 2024 promises to be more of the same, if not worse, a taxpayer’s nightmare.
It can’t keep going like this.
The IOC has been warned, time and again, by taxpayers in western democracies that enough is enough. And yet— the IOC keeps going along with evolution when what it needs is revolution.
Incremental nibbling around the margins is not enough. That’s what the IOC delivered Monday. It needs wholesale, fundamental change. Now.
As difficult as it will be, and it will be difficult, the Games have got to be cut down to size.
Put another way: the IOC needs financial liposuction.
Or another: change is imperative.
Or else the Games, and the IOC, run the risk of being — NBC-style reality show allusion here — The Biggest Loser.
The delayed Tokyo Games are now up by roughly $2.8 billion, that money to be covered by Japanese taxpayers. Meanwhile, the IOC is crowing about having saved $280 million from the Tokyo 2020 operating budget. That’s 10 percent. That’s lipstick.
The $2.8 billion brings the total budget to somewhere near $15 billion or, if you believe accounting from another source, $30 billion.
That’s hideous.
Particularly when the all-in budget when Tokyo won the Games was supposed to be $7.8 billion.
A significant reason for this bloat is the number of events, and the number of sports, which means the number of federations involved.
Most casual fans of the Olympics do not understand that the IOC does not “run” the separate sports themselves at an edition of the Games. The IOC leaves that job up to the separate international sports federations, which in Olympic jargon are called IFs.
Traditionally, the IFs are ferociously protective of their Olympic quotas. And, of course, the fields of play upon which they get — every four years — to shine. This means the stadiums and arenas and so on.
As was expected, boxing and weightlifting, wracked by governance and doping scandals, got their quotas for Paris whacked.
Someone somewhere had to make room for, you know, breaking.
But let’s look closely at the overall number.
Because the IOC insisted in Monday’s news release, among other things, “We are further reducing the cost and complexity of hosting the Games.”
That’s simply not true.
The Tokyo Games will see 339 medal events. 339!
That’s up from 306 at the Rio 2016 Games. For easy math, let’s just say roughly 10 percent.
The IOC is boasting that the Paris count is dropping from 339 to 329.
That is true.
But here’s why.
All the IOC did was cut karate (eight events and 80 athletes) and baseball/softball (two events, 234 athletes) from the Tokyo 2020 program.
Essentially, it did nothing.
Karate was always going to be a one-off. Baseball/softball is more than likely to receive strong consideration for Los Angeles in 2028.
More math (sorry): the 314 athletes that those two — karate and baseball/softball — account for make up the big chunk of the 529 athletes the IOC is cheering about in its cut from 11,029 athletes in Tokyo to a purported 10,500 in Paris. That’s purported because the final number is almost always more than 10,500. Stay tuned.
Here’s another thought. Or — to be honest, some threads:
— IOC president Thomas Bach is going to be re-elected in the spring to his second term, four years following a first eight-year term.
— Los Angeles rescued the movement in 1984 and it’s gonna have to do it again in 2028.
— LA28 chair Casey Wasserman is a huge proponent of change.
— Bach will be out of office by 2025. LA is not his responsibility. Not really.
— This means he is free, with Wasserman, to put in motion the change that’s necessary.
No more lip service. Real change. The whole idea of what an Olympics is in the 21st century needs to be rethought. As has been suggested here before, hire the likes of Deloitte (disclosure: daughter works for the company but is headed next fall to business school), McKinsey or Bain to do a workup because this is obviously too difficult to figure out from the inside out.
Not too difficult: a whole bunch of these sports need to go. Easily a third. Start with shooting.