Good for Paco Boxy, the face of British breakdancing, who came out with a punchy – one might say nominatively characteristic – comment on hearing that the sport was to be included (pending ratification) in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
“A lot of people will look at breakdancing as just spinning on your head or doing the worm,” he said, “but the people that I know train like athletes. They go to the gym swimming, train every day. For this to go in the Olympics is massive.”
I myself do not look at breakdancing in terms of spinning and worms, but that is because it rarely crosses my mind at all, unless the family story is being reprised of when cousin Tony got too drunk at a wedding and performed said moves in the middle of the oldsters doing the Siege of Ennis.
But now, along with millions of others, I have only five years to become expert at my chosen sport, which is to sit glued to the sofa dispensing knowledgeable gems on the history, technique, personnel and practice of ever more unfamiliar disciplines. That too requires training, Mr Boxy: the commitment to provision one’s dwelling to the gills with beer and Doritos and to forgo work, social life and national emergencies in order to fully channel the Olympian spirit. “Let down by his Jackhammer,” I hope soon to be saying of a battling B-Boy. “And his 6-step really wasn’t all it ought to be.”
For the naysayers, though, breakdancing’s likely arrival to the Games is eclipsed only by the news that in France, lightsaber duelling has just been officially recognised as a competitive sport. What is the world coming to when doing a passable impression of Obi-Wan Kenobi is on a par with doing that painful-looking hoppy-skippy run and hurling oneself into a sandpit? A world where you can medal in ribbon-twirling and beach volleyball, that’s where. A world where middle managers who have grittily inveigled their way up the inter-county squash ladder are nonetheless doomed to tune in every four years and fail to see themselves represented.
All of which complaints are to ignore the origins of the modern Olympic Games in favour of the altogether more bracing myths that surround those of antiquity, in which Heracles built the Olympic stadium as a warmdown after completing the 12 labours. Back in the early days, after all, the Olympics was attached to the great city fairs, the Paris Expo and the Louisiana Purchase Expo, functioning as an add-on to the dizzying celebration of all that was new and shiny; and even as the Games developed, they were never not about showmanship.
But it is perfectly fair to argue that the International Olympic Committee is a bloated, directionless organisation, so thirsty for the gravy train of global television contracts that it has lost reason and judgment.
While breakdancing is not evidence of that, the constant quest to grow the competition while struggling to get to grips with systematic doping, rampant commercialisation and knife-edge geopolitical situations surely is. When athletes are discovering, years after the event, that they’re moving closer to or higher up the podium as cheats are retrospectively disqualified, there’s clearly a problem.
So, a modest proposal or, rather, a choice: either strip it right back or go the whole hog. Be one thing or the other: a home to squash, breakdancing and lightsabering, preferably in glorious combination, or a streamlined, back-to-basics showdown. In the former version, there might even be a chance to revivify the most arcane of sports, long disappeared from view – the practice of sitting on a tiny platform at the top of a pole, for example, imaginatively called pole-sitting and once unfathomably popular. Elsewhere, a lady might climb up a very long ladder and dive into a teacup in the manner of an Angela Carter novel or a Somerset Maugham short story.
In the latter, we would have perhaps only eight events, centring around running and jumping, picking up heavy things, the horsey ones and the watery ones. Wrestling in pyjamas: on your bike. Golf and football: you’ll have to make do with the Masters and the Champions League. Bows and arrows: sorry.
It would make for thinner TV gruel, admittedly, but we’d all be back to full productivity within the week. But on second thoughts, that’s the last thing we want. Let the robots do the work – I’m watching the BMX bikes.
• Alex Clark writes for the Observer