As the flames of the Olympics fade, continued conversation about Rachael Gunn’s abysmal breakdancing performance persists. Passionate debate has been focused on her lack of technical breakdancing skills and basic self-awareness. However, the fundamental issue with this year’s breakdancing controversy is deeper than — and extends well beyond — the performance of any one individual. The problem is stripping away the place-based significance and sacredness of breakdancing itself and narrowly positioning it as an Olympic sport. 

According to media outlets such as USA Today, the inclusion of breakdancing in the Olympics was a strategy to “appeal to younger fans and add an urban flair to the Summer Games.” In focusing on including breakdancing to reach new demographics, a fundamental question went unasked: Can a public space ritual and performance, emerging from a specific ethno-racial, class, and cultural context, become an Olympic sport? 

The answer may have been absolutely. After all, most sports emerge from specific place-based and cultural contexts. For example, cricket finds its roots in south-east England and is now one of the most popular sports played in India and Pakistan, both former colonies of the British empire. Basketball was invented by a Canadian residing in the United States of America, and today, the sport is largely dominated by African American players, in part due to the accessibility of a ball and hoop. The historical connections between sport, place and culture are well documented. However, negating the spatial and cultural aspects of breakdancing at this year’s Olympic competition created the conditions for chaos. 

In the fall of 2021, my placemaking practice — located at the nexus of urban planning and social justice — was contracted by the City of Toronto to develop a proposal and high-level program framework to guide the development of the City’s first-ever cultural district program. I opened the proposal by referencing Hip Hop because I wanted to highlight the complex dimensions of culture beyond a traditional performative sense, and because I am a part of the Hip Hop generation. I wrote: 

Hip Hop emanates from the inner city in the early 1970s during the post-industrial era amid economic decline and seismic political shifts, disproportionately impacting racialized inner-city communities. Youth, like DJ Kool Herc who is lauded as the “Father of Hip Hop,” flooded the New York City streets, searching for a platform for collective expression and opportunity. With its emphasis on the drumbeat and elongated break, Hip Hop created a musical breath for rapping, and other interrelated elements such as breakdancing, graffiti, entrepreneurism, community values and a new urban dialect. It transcended the bounds of artmaking — its breakbeat was a political breath within the margins.

The people who infused life into breakdancing, and Hip Hop more broadly, were primarily of African descent along with Latinx people who co-shaped its culture alongside them within their communities. Like all Hip Hop elements, breakdancing was more than a sport or performance. In some instances, breakdancing battles diffused conflicts that could have become physical, and some young men, like the guys from my ‘hood, breakdanced on the streets for money to purchase lunch or help out their mothers. 

Back when I was growing up, breakdancing was a kinetic language and precious gift between people who lived in public housing communities, and it was a way of being seen and boldly asserting personal value beyond the confines of those same communities. Whether we danced or not, it was a part of our place-based identity and pride. 

Since that time, breakdancing, and Hip Hop more broadly, have become regarded as a universal artform, which is fitting given its early message of love, unity and community. However, it has always been place-centred, whether at the hyper-local block level or bi-national level, with explicit regional distinctions. Also, the most respected and authentic artists practicing Hip Hop or any of its inter-related expressions, tend to have lived experiences of the margins — low-income ‘hoods, trailer parks and Indigenous reservations. Rachael Gunn claims to have an academic understanding of the “cultural politics” of breakdancing. However, regardless of racial identity, having an embodied, community-centred understanding of breakdancing is paramount. 

But again, this issue isn’t about Rachael Gunn. 

The Olympics’ narrow framing of breakdancing as simply sport is indicative of a much larger institutional and individual pattern with decoupling Black cultural expressions from Black bodies and Black communities. This phenomenon is older than redlining and as current as the forces of gentrification erasing Black people from their culturally rich communities. Due to the transatlantic slave trade and the proprietorship of the plantation, Black people are often deemed placeless. As a result, individuals of all identities regularly erase and fail to respectfully attribute Black cultural practices and the places that make them possible. There isn’t a broader understanding that these practices — and even the fraught places they are created within — are why Black culture wields such distinct popular potency. 

While it is exciting to share, experience and embrace each other’s cultures, acknowledging places of origin and the people who poured their lifeblood into cultural expressions is crucial. Failing to extend this basic form of respect to all people has consequences far greater than online vitriol and embarrassing memes. Specifically, the consequences for Black communities include significant Black cultural sites being excluded from heritage designations, disproportionate displacement of Black businesses amid urban revitalization projects and lack of investment in Black cultural hubs. While a horrendous — and for some comedic — Olympic performance seems trivial and perhaps unrelated to these prevalent placemaking issues, they are symptomatic of the exact same systemic pattern. 

Just as most municipalities lack the systemic processes and policies to counteract centuries of spatialized anti-Blackness, the Olympics also lacked systems to address the same. From the woefully incomplete framing of the introduction of breakdancing as an inaugural Olympic sport to the glaring lack of representation among the judges — during both the qualifiers and the main event — there was inadequate cultural infrastructure to support success. The care wasn’t taken to build a unifying bridge between the ‘hood and the Olympic stage. What resulted was an all too predictable invisibility and display of unhealthy spatial entitlement. This was the real problem behind this year’s Olympic breakdancing debacle. 

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Jay Pitter, MES, is an award-winning placemaker, adjunct urban planning professor and author whose practice mitigates growing divides in cities across North America. Her forthcoming books, Black Public Joy and Where We Live, will be published by McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House Canada.