Featured Image Credit: Kevin Voigt / Maja Hitij / Getty Images
Topics: Extreme Sports, Olympics, Sport, US News, Weird, World News
Tom Earnshaw
Topics: Extreme Sports, Olympics, Sport, US News, Weird, World News
The 2024 Paris Olympics have been millions tune in across the world as thousands of athletes compete for the illustrious top prize of a gold medal.
With 329 medal events across the two and a half week multi-sport event, we're talking around 1,000 medals given out in total across the gold, silver and bronze categories.
At the heart of the showcase will be events like the marathon which has stood the test of time, taking place every four years since the very first modern Olympic Games, taking place almost 130 years ago in 1896.
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But there's no time like the present to make a change. And that includes introducing new disciplines for the first time ever.
Three new sports debuted in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. And for the Paris Games, we'll welcome another one.
Brand new for the 2024 Games is a discipline known as Breaking.
To me and you, we might refer to it as breakdancing.
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Established in the early 1980s in the New York City suburb of The Bronx, breaking combines dancing with rhythmic backing.
Fast forward 40 years, it has become a legitimate competitive sport where people 'battle' against each other for top prizes.
The International Olympic Committee decided breaking would be included in the 2024 Paris Olympics following a proposal by the World DanceSport Federation.
Its Olympic debut was during the 2018 Youth Games, though, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The breaking competition will be held over two days on Friday and Saturday, 9 and 10 August. These are the penultimate days of the tournament which comes to an end on the Sunday.
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Athletes will face off on the iconic Place de la Concorde, one of Paris' major public squares that has been transformed for the competition.
A total of 32 people will take part in the dancing, split equally between male and female contestants in face-to-face battles.
They will be tasked with improvising their dances to the beat of the DJ's music in a bid to score higher than their opponent. Each battle will be a best-of-three rounds, with each round lasting one minute.
France will have the joint most contestants with four. This is alongside Japan and the USA.
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China will have three; the same as the Netherlands and Ukraine.
According to NBC, the favourite for the men's competition is American Victor Montalvo from Orlando.
For the women, Lithuania's Dominika Banevic - aged just 17 - is tipped for gold having won the 2023 world title.
Enjoy it while you can, though, as it looks like it is a one and done event for breaking.
Despite the 2028 Games taking place in the USA across the city of Los Angeles, the discipline has not been included in the official Olympic programme.