Seeing this video I am 100 % convinced that break dance battles are the most wholesome form of direct competition. These two athletes treating each other with respect and fun while competing against each other for Olympic gold ist just amazing.

Holy crap, he looked like when the character physics glitch out in a video game, but under control at the same time.

Holy shit, their whole routines are improvised. They hadn’t heard the music before.

I am fucking floored.

That was amazing!

The performance was amazing, the announcers sucked.

When I watch any Olympic competition I have never seen before I have some idea what is going on because the announcers make a point of saying who these people are, why a move is difficult/impressive, what the requirements are, and why deductions might happen.

Here all I heard was “YA BOOOOOOYYYYYYY!” through the entire performance, with a brief mention of an error made by France but I have no idea what that error actually was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlXvjFf5baw

I don’t know, I think he was more into changing into animals and raping humans.

Was awesome. It’s not going to return. This guy will go down as undefeated which is a silver lining I suppose.

On the CBC coverage they didn’t use anyone’s real names, it was all just dance names.

I thought it was super entertaining compared to something like running or high jump. If anyone doubts these people’s athleticism, just watch and you’ll change your mind.

When you’ve got those kinds of abs, you have to give the crowd what they want.

You can bet your ass detractors will use that aussie woman to say that it has no place in the olympics.

Hating on women is so hot right now

What’s wrong with this being an Olympic event? It’s incredibly athletic.

Did you bother watching? This is essentially floor gymnastics to a beat. Does line dancing require this much physical skill and coordination? And to be clear, Ice Dancing came before this.

What’s next? Horse dancing?

Flag football

Figure skating is also an olympic competition, is it not?

Very interesting take, Very Talented Technical Dancer. You really gave us all something to think about.

This take reminds me of the family dinner scene from Whiplash

I think its a way to argue that sports developed by certain groups shouldn’t be allowed in the Olympics because then those who didn’t traditionally develop said sport might compete in them. It results in exclusion, which is worse than the risk of cultural appropriation IMO.

Cultural appropriation is bullshit is what I think. Let people adapt and improvise. Anything else is pure conservatism.

I’m not convinced cultural appropriation, in the pejorative sense, is a valid concept. In all the examples of cultural appropriation I’ve seen that I agree are bad, there’s a better way to explain why it’s bad. For example, wearing Native American headdresses isn’t bad because a white person does it; it’s bad because it’s something you have to earn, like a medal, and the white people using it as a costume haven’t earned it. It would be equally disrespectful for a Native American to do the same thing.

Man fuck all the downvoters, this is a perfectly valid question. If they started a haka competition people wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this.

To answer you question, no idea, never thought of it. I’m pretty ignorant of break culture but I’d be interested to hear what those in the culture think of it’s inclusion.

I think dance is a valid sport. Synchronized swimming is water line dancing and figure skating can be classified as dancing on ice. All in all if you think it does not require the kind of dedication that other sports take, you are plain wrong.

Ice dancing has been an event in the winter Olympics since 1976. Not just figure skating, it’s literally called ice dancing.

Figure skating is a dance. Hell, gymnastics is basically a dance as well.

The only reason I wouldn’t be in favor of an Olympic chili cookoff is that the audience wouldn’t be able to taste the chili.

It is a sport by definition. “An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.”

Well it won’t be coming back to the Olympics so I guess you can take comfort in that.

Weightlifting

It’s exercise. It’s in the name. It’s not a sport, it’s exercise. I’m expecting the next Olympics to have running, maybe swimming and a jumping event, since exercise is a sport now.

I wish they would break apart events like this vs “serious” competitive sports away from each other and the Olympics. Some events/sports have verifiable results, like somebody ran this fast in this amount of time, somebody lifted this amount of kg of weights, actual results that are in some sense pushing the limits of what humans are capable of.

Then you have the artistic, interpretive events, though they still require alot of talent and skill, you can’t quantify them, you can’t measure them in any meaningful way. They’re judged subjectively using whatever standards were developed probably decades ago. I’m sure they’re great to watch for fans of those events, but they don’t feel like they’re pushing any limits of human expression or anything, the Olympics is way too sanitized for anything like that.

I don’t know what the solution though is, hold two sets of Olympics, the Sports Olympics and the Artsy Olympics (four total with seasonal olympics)? I think it’s too much of a world tradition at this point, but it bothers me that they’re all considered at the “same level”.