The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification

Abstract

In this article, we analyse the impact of breaking’s inclusion in the Olympics on the Australian breaking scene. We draw on our experiences as Australian breaking practitioners, as well as ethnographic field research conducted between 2018 and 2021, to show how Australian breakers have responded to, and made sense of, breaking becoming an Olympic sport. While some breakers see the Olympics as an opportunity and space for wider recognition, many have expressed concerns with the growing influence (and embrace) of transnational commercial organizations and institutional governing bodies in shaping and managing breaking’s future. Alongside concerns of an increasing sportification of breaking, this trajectory points towards an increasing loss of self-determination, agency and spontaneity for local Australian breakers and will have profound consequences for the way in which hip hop personhood is constantly ‘remade and renegotiated’ in Australia (Marie 2020: 4). Isolated from the major breaking hubs (North America/Asia/Europe), Australia’s breaking scene is marked by distinct, self-determined localized scenes separated from each other by the geographic expansiveness of this island-continent. Here, breaking is a space for those ‘othered’ by Australian institutions to express themselves and engage in new hierarchies of respect. We argue that breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized and gendered hierarchies. As such, in this article we discuss and examine how the Olympics impacts ongoing local, social and cultural productions and expressions of hip hop, and the distinct possibilities of breaking that enable its participants to ‘show and prove’ outside standardized, institutionalized rubrics.