How a New York gang truce spawned an Olympic sport

The introduction of breaking into the Olympics for Paris 2024 may have surprised many, but for Michael Holman - writer, producer, artist, entrepreneur and self-dubbed hip-hop pioneer - it was the realisation of a 40-year vision.

The Games' website describes breaking as a "hip-hop" style of dance characterised by 'acrobatic movement and stylized footwork'.

The format is fundamentally different to ice dancing or gymnastics though. Athletes don't wait their turn to perform one-by-one and impress judges.

Instead breakers will take to the floor in pairs in Paris, "battling" head-to-head and upping each other's moves to take home a medal.

Back in the early 1980s, Holman ran a weekly hip-hop revue in a downtown Manhattan club which combined rap and graffiti with the new form of street dance.

At first, it was about performance. The breakers would dance, the audience would applaud, the evening would move on and the next act would appear.

But Holman insisted on adding one more element to his booming club night.

"New York is all about competition and about trying to be the best," he said. "And I wanted to bring another crew along to battle. I want the audience to see a battle, not just moves."

It's what Holman had witnessed months earlier on the streets of the Bronx. There, breaking had emerged as a form of dance combat, springing from a shift in the gang tensions that had blighted 1970s New York.

"There were the Ghetto Brothers and the Black Spades, the Savage Nomads, and the Savage Skulls. And they'd been bloodletting for years: breaking heads, killing, stabbing each other," he said.

"Then, in 1971, Yellow Benjy - the leader of the Ghetto Brothers - forced a truce that allowed the guys and gals from rival gangs to get together and party."

It was at these parties, where dance replaced violence as an outlet for neighbourhood bravado, that the city's many cultures cultivated breaking's creativity.

Holman continued: "Breakers would watch other breakers saying: 'Wow, that's wild. The way you're bringing in Kung Fu moves from the Chinese community. I'm gonna incorporate your Kung Fu and put it with my African cakewalk dance, or incorporate it with a Puerto Rican gymnastics aesthetic.' And all this while dancing to old James Brown records mixed on Jamaican-style sound systems. That's the culture of b-boy dance."

The first band of breakers resident at Holman's nights were a group he informally managed called the "Rock Steady Crew". Initially, they were loathed to share a stage with a rival outfit, but eventually they relented to Holman's requests.

"I brought down a crew called the 'Floor Masters' and boom, it was like a historic moment," said Holman. "The 'Floor Masters' were much more about athleticism and speed and power, and when I saw them battle, I dropped the 'Rock Steady Crew' like a hot potato."

Holman helped form and then manage a new breaking crew that would focus solely on the 'power' moves he'd witnessed from the 'Floor Masters'.

They recruited the best dancers from the best crews across the city's five boroughs and named the new group the 'New York City Breakers'. It featured some of the art form's best exponents: Noel 'Kid Nice' Manguel, Matthew 'Glide Master' Caban, and Tony 'Powerful Pexster' Lopez.

Together, they took breaking to an all-new level of skill.

"I got rid of the weak dancers and raided three or four other crews from the city. I created a super crew of power breaking," said Holman.

"The Breakers were able to like, gyroscope. They'd start out doing footwork and then go down to the ground and, using some sort of internal propulsion, mixed with the friction of the ground, simultaneously ball themselves up in a certain way or spread out in a certain way, they'd create an internal energy.

"They were able to spin and do these flares. They figured out a new way to move, and it was pure poetry."

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