> Trying to force a countercultural artistic endeavor into a box created by the International Olympic Committee — the oldest of old-school conservatism

I watched a little bit of it and I thought it was fun. Break dancing is exciting to watch and the dancers were smiling and looked like they had a good time.

I think the ioc made a fine product for us normies to enjoy.

I keep seeing takes that are negative on breaking. Like let people have fun. I bet the competitors are happy to dance on the world stage.

This is interesting, because the argument came from an angle I wasn't expecting. I was expecting the contemptful-of-anything-new "that's ridiculous this isn't a sport" argument that I've heard from the various older people in my life. Instead I got, "this is watering down a form of counter-culture expression".

Which is also wrong, but at least differently wrong. This seems like the usual counter-culture gatekeeping. "Hey! We carved out a unique art form, just for us on the ingroup, and you outgroupers don't get to enjoy it without going through some social rituals!" I understand the sentiment, but nothing about mainstream attention is keeping the b-people from continuing to do their own thing.

I wonder if surfing will survive as well. I enjoyed watching it at night with my wife when all the other sports were done for the day, but it was really hard to follow the logic of how a ride was scored. They also had to pause for a couple of days for a storm, and some rounds the waves were clearly not wanting to play along and resulted in less impressive rides.

I don’t understand the argument here if there even is one. He didn’t like the way it was judged and he didn’t understand why raygun was there, so the whole thing should be thrown out? Also — he says the judging is too conservative for such a new sport, so we should in turn be even more conservative and get rid of breaking. This makes no sense.

I really think it should just have been routine based similar to gymnastics. Have a scoring system and let each person do their routine.

Having two people on stage and playing off of each other was really awkward.

Having a routine based system would really highlight the difficulty and skill that some are capable of.

> The further breaking moves in the direction of sport, the further away it moves from being art.

That's definitely true. The demands of sport are going to push things into more physically demanding/technically impressive direction, which will conflict and constrain any artistry.

I don't know much about gymnastics, but I watched some of the balance beam stuff, and it felt like there were some remnants of artistry there (all the hand and leg movements they do between major moves), but they all felt dead and rote to me.

Welp, we gave 'er a go, wasn't what we thought it was gonna be, but we got some good memes out of it.

Can't wait for the Stare Out Contest at the '28 Olympics! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkI85Kt10e4

Olympics is boring, it should become the World's Fair once again. More break dancing, more Starcraft II, launch a starship at the height of it all.

Probably one of the only sports that doesn't require very specific genetic mutations to compete in at an Olympic level.

"counter cultural artistic endeavors" do not usually have sponsors.

I tend to agree with the article, but to be honest "Break" is not high on my list either way.

This caught my eye:

>Softball is in … Oklahoma City?

Really, will they put heat lamps on the players too ? I have been to Oklahoma City in June for a 2 week large national convention almost 30 years ago. I thought I was going to die from the heat, and everyone from the north part of the US were miserable.

One OK person said "It does not get hot until August", a young lady from Washington State went ballistic yelling about the heat. I just laughed.

30 years later with Climate Change, playing Softball in Oklahoma City in July, are you kidding. I hope the have 5000 ambulances there sitting waiting for people to faint.