First, you need to know that 1984 was quite a year for what the media incorrectly called “breakdancing.” The movies Breakin’ and Beat Street were released, and the Majestic Visual Break Dancers crew (which included future actor Cuba Gooding, Jr.) performed behind a sequin-clad Lionel Richie as he sang All Night Long at the closing ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. That same year, Chino ‘Action’ Lopez of the legendary crew the New York City Breakers wrote on a piece of paper: “We, the New York City Breakers, see the Olympic Games as our future. We see breakdancing as a future Olympic sport, and ourselves as pioneers in making this dream a reality. Signed by all the New York City Breakers.”

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Time is a funny thing. It’s at once absolute and malleable, linear and cyclical. Here we are again, 40 years later, and breaking is about to make its debut at the Paris Olympic Games—not as a form of entertainment but as a competitive sport.

There has been much discussion about its inclusion in the Olympics, and impassioned opinions are coming from all sides: from bewildered sports fans, from excited dance enthusiasts and from deep within the breaking community itself. “It’s this whole sport-verses-art thing,” London “B-Boy London” Reyes told Observer. “Everybody’s trying to make breaking one or the other. To me, I think it can be two things at once.”

Reyes, who grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Yonkers, entered the underground hip-hop scene in 1979 as a DJ (“But not as the main DJ, just as a guy that would carry the crates.”) and started dancing in 1981. He was an early member of the New York City Breakers and has stayed connected to the crew and the wider B-boy community ever since. “You can be disappointed in how it all played out,” he said, referring to the long and complicated journey to get breaking accepted by the International Olympic Committee, “But you can’t be disappointed that it’s in the Olympics. That’s something to be celebrated!” Then he added with a laugh that “it’s amazing something that started in the Bronx took the world over, really.”

Breaking did start in the Bronx in New York City in the 1970s, as did the other pillars of hip-hop culture: DJing, MCing and graffiti art. The elements were inseparable, then: all part of a new lifestyle. Hip-hop’s origin story is the stuff of legends—a young Jamaican American DJ, a block party, a set of turntables and two identical records, people dancing to the instrumental breaks in the music.

The new style that evolved amid all that combined elements from many sources—gymnastics, martial arts and capoeira, double dutch and social dances like funk, disco, the Lindy Hop and the Charleston. Breaking has always been both artistic and athletic.

Breaking (and hip-hop culture in general) spread through the city and then, when the mainstream media took an interest, through the country and the world. Crews began to form and practice together, meeting up with other crews to show off their new routines and battle each other in gatherings that were casual but competitive.

At the time, breakers were mostly Black and Puerto Rican, mostly young and mostly male. B-girls were there from the beginning, too, but there were fewer, and they didn’t get as much attention in the media. Ana “Rokafella” Garcia entered the scene in 1994 when breaking was, as she told Observer, “not popular” anymore. “Many of the male Breakers from the original generation weren’t so receptive to women trying to participate in Breaking… It was only a few who were enthusiastic about welcoming and helping to develop B-girl talent.”

One of those few was Gabriel........

© Observer