Rob Pountney of Breaking GB explores the issues that face breaking ahead of its Olympic debut at Paris 2024.
He is talking to an audience at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London about the announcement that breaking was to be added to the list of competition events for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
“The decision was made in December 2020,” he tells moderator Edd Vahid. “We scrambled then to put together an organisation in a very short space of time that would enable the best breakers in the UK to have a chance to feel supported, have the opportunity to qualify, compete and obviously make the important relationships with the organisations, that I’m sure you’re all aware of, to support them with funding, training, and explore the new ideas of transitioning from what is essentially a cultural dance into the sporting system and find the ways that we can add value to the breakers – we can call them ‘athletes’ now – when you see what they can do I think you’ll appreciate the physicality and the dynamics of what they’re able to do.”
Breaking (sometimes known as ‘breakdancing’) is a type of street dance, characterised by four kinds of movement, known as toprock, downrock, power moves and freezes. It has its origins in the Bronx and emerged as part of New York’s burgeoning hip-hop scene in the early 1970s.
There is a long-established competition circuit and in contests, known as ‘battles’, the breakers receive no notice of what a DJ may play and they have to respond in the moment.
The challenge for Pountney and Breaking GB is to understand where they can add value. “We’ve only had one official test camp,” he says. “We went to the University of Bath Sports Village and essentially it was an induction three or four days but it’s trial and error for us because breaking is quite circular in its path and, to become an amazing breaker/performer, there’s no straight point A to point B. We’re not trying to be faster, stronger; ‘who can jump the highest?’ That kind of thing. This is about pushing the individual boundaries of your own creation to where they can possibly go.
Breaking’s current challenge was recently faced by the woman who sits next to Pountney onstage, GB Climbing’s Head of Performance Lorraine Brown. The organisation sent Shauna Coxsey, its first Olympian, to the delayed Tokyo Games in 2021 when competition climbing was itself added to the Summer Games list of sports.
“We’re actually employing full-time coaches for the first time,” Brown tells Vahid. “But part of it is understanding what it takes to win in the sport. Previously, if you were sixth-best in the UK, you get selected, you go to the competition. ‘Well done’. It’s more about the taking part. The focus on performance has definitely stepped up and really understanding the nuances and the performance standards within the sport and the massive cultural shift that we’re probably looking at.”
The challenge of shifting the needle remains ongoing for GB Climbing and, for his part, Pountney understands where Breaking GB can presently add value for its breakers (commonly known as B-boys and B-Girls).
“The benefit of working in a sporting system is the more scientific approach to the body. It’s not something that we’ve ever had to consider before. The guys are fit, they go to the gym, and they exercise but they never actually have any outside support in a professional capacity – so strength & conditioning, flexibility coaching, psychology, even nutrition – everything to do with what sport brings to the table can definitely benefit the breakers.”
Days before the summit, in early November 2022, the Guardian reported on a study between Break Mission, a British community-based breaking initiative, and Birmingham City University, to better understand the physical attributes of breakers. In the Guardian piece, sports scientist Matthew Cole explained that the breakers’ lab scores are often on par with athletes in other sports and were athletes in the “truest sense”.
Cole added that with growing sophistication in data analysis, insights could ultimately identify potential champions. “Take Lizzy Yarnold in the skeleton bob,” he said. “She went to a talent ID day. She had the characteristics, four years later wins a gold medal.”
Pountney is optimistic about the impact that Breaking GB can have. “We’re fortunate that on our board we’ve got two highly skilled professionals in Rebecca Edgington-Harvey who’s the Performance Manager for GB Boxing, who is used to working with data analysis and capture, and we also have Tracy Whittaker-Smith who’s the Head Coach of British Gymnastics,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute backstage.
“Between them they are looking at video analysis, we’re looking at competition analysis of the performers and how they’re faring in competition, what are their strengths and weaknesses and we’re taking those bits of information and we’re doing feedback sessions regularly with the breakers and, in terms of a collecting data at the moment, it’s a new path for us, we’re only just starting out.”
Nevertheless, Pountney and his peers are keen to prevent breaking’s cultural heritage being sacrificed in favour of performance. “It’s also important that we try to create an environment for them that feeds their inspiration. One of the things we can try to do is find locations and hubs that bring people together.”
That brings its own coaching challenges. The United States, as one would expect, has an established breaking culture, while France, Japan, China and South Korea have a long-standing global pedigree. Great Britain, by comparison, is a relative newcomer. “Exploring the idea of who can come in to coach, that’s quite challenging, especially in GB, we don’t have high level advisors. Some of the other nations may have recently-retired breakers who are in that mid-30s age group who can come in very professionally, and they’ve got that respect level,” adds Pountney.
He is more confident, however, when it comes to the support Breaking GB can provide around fitness and lifestyles. There have been tangible results. In November 2022, the European Breaking Championships took place in Manchester, England, with Derby’s Karam Singh winning a silver medal for Great Britain. A month earlier, Breaking GB sent a team to the Breaking World Championships in Seoul, South Korea.
“We’ve got a lot of feedback from that we can then relay to the breakers,” Pountney tells the Leaders Performance Institute. He picks up on the importance of psychological support. “When you can see a breaker that’s having issues with their confidence or if they’re too affected by their own lack of performance on the day it’s important that they don’t let that show through because, at the end of the day, they are performing and judges are scoring them and what might be visible to them in terms of mistakes isn’t always very visible to an audience, to a judge; and so I think it’s really important that they keep that positive mindset all of the time when they’re competing.”
On the competition front, Singh, whose stage name is Kid Karam, has indicated that his aim is to not only qualify but win a medal in Paris and he is one of a series of British hopefuls competing for just 32 slots at the Olympics (16 B-Boys and 16 B-Girls will enter a knockout competition) and he and his peers will have several opportunities to qualify ahead of the event, including the European Games in Kraków-Małopolska, Poland, which take place across June and July.
Pountney explains onstage that having those back-to-back championships in 2022 showed British breakers that Breaking GB offers a transparent and results-driven selection process. It also demonstrated that the best breakers will have access to funding and travel expenses. That said, there is the challenge of identifying and developing the next generation from a talent pool numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
It is a slightly wider pool in competition climbing, but Brown suggests that Breaking GB could seek to inherit athletes from other disciplines. “A lot of our athletes come from other sports,” she says. “They’ve already been in other sports, they migrate to climbing because of the culture, it’s not as competitive, it’s a bit more free-spirited, and if I look in our current team we’ve got gymnasts, swimmers, we’ve got people in athletics who have come to our sport. How do we still provide an outlet for athletes to try something different?” To be fair, there are already British breakers who have gone down that path, such as Stirling’s Emma Houston, AKA Shortbread, who gave up playing football for Falkirk to concentrate on her breaking career.
All in all, Pountney is optimistic for 2023. “The big opportunity in the year ahead is definitely qualification,” he says. “It will make a massive difference, the legacy of somebody competing at the Olympic Games will massively raise the profile in Britain of breaking as a sport. From a grassroots perspective, it’s a chance to look at how we can grow the participation levels and inclusion in breaking across the country, access to the school networks, the development of facilities and the provision of training spaces across the country.”
At the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium, we heard from Lorraine and Rob who have been at the forefront of two new sports, and how they preparing for Olympics whilst staying true to the culture of their sports.
