Predicting breaking in the Olympics: A 40-year retrospective

Abstract

Before breaking’s official announcement into the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, other practitioners and members of pioneering crew the New York City Breakers had already dreamed about this future. This article presents an interview with breaking’s first impresario Michael Holman, who was the first individual to document this vision of breaking’s Olympic future in his book Breaking and the New York City Breakers (1984). Holman’s history in hip hop culture is both well documented and persists as one of the most important accounts of hip hop cultural intermediation and entrepreneurship. Notably, his early work in the New York scene was instrumental in developing hip hop and setting in motion the first wave of commercial viability for breaking. Holman’s discovery and management of breakers pushed boundaries in a time where few opportunities for professionalization existed – presenting breaking in new contexts for performance, showcase and expression, such as on television and in theatre. Our interview looks back to brushes with the Olympics in the past to think critically about what potential outcomes emerge from this pivotal moment in the dance’s global mainstream rediscovery. Holman’s reflections demonstrate how breaking in the Olympics has been articulated in the past while reminding us that breaking’s industrialization has already been underway for decades.