“Nothing’s going to change the culture, the culture stays the same,” Colón said.

Joe Conzo, Jr, a photographer known in the community as “Joey Snapz,” who documented hip hop in the Bronx from its infancy, also sat stageside taking pictures of the Olympic hopefuls. The OGs offered blessings to their descendants by giving them dap - a friendly gesture of greeting in the Black and Latino communities that communicates solidarity and well wishes to the recipient. The energy drink beverage company runs the world’s largest breaking competition. One by one, Red Bull BC One World Final competitors from Canada, China, France, Italy, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Venezuela took to the battle stage. “You never thought that something you were doing for fun was going to go around the world,” said Douglas “Dancin’ Doug” Colón, a b-boy of the first generation of breakers from Harlem who beamed with pride over the dance form’s acceptance into the Olympics.Īlong with Colón, first generation b-boy Trixie sat near a circular stage in the center of Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom. 12 event also attracted some of the original b-boys and b-girls, as the hip hop community prepares to celebrate 50 years since the culture’s founding in 1973. The International Olympic Committee announced two years ago that breaking would become an official Olympic sport, a development that divided the breaking community between those excited for the larger platform and those concerned about the art form’s purity.īut after the Red Bull BC One World Final, held earlier this month in the birthplace of hip hop and a short distance from the very streets where Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers pioneered the art of breaking, the field of Olympic competitors is starting to take shape. He is among dozens of champion b-boys and b-girls - a term for a male or female entrenched in the culture of hip hop - who are charting a path to the 2024 Games in Paris.

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