Breaking is not bad – the B-girls face-off and delight the Paris crowds

From The Bronx to La Concorde, via the back-alleys of Kabul and the banlieues that ring Paris like a vinyl record, breakdancing touched down on the global stage on Friday, bringing top-rocks, freezes and down-lows into the Olympic lexicon for the first time.

In the same square where Marie Antoinette was sent to the guillotine two-and-a-quarter centuries ago, the world’s top 32 B-girls executed their moves in a series of face-offs against a backdrop of tracks curated by the competition’s resident DJs, Plash One and Fleg.

Among the history-makers were 671, a Chinese teenager understood to be the first Olympic athlete without a letter to her name, and Talash, representing the Refugee Team, who fled Afghanistan with her 12-year-old brother when the Taliban’s arrival forced her breakdancing club to close.

On her solitary appearance in the pre-qualifier, and to roars of approval from a capacity crowd at the hugely successful Urban Park, Talash ripped off her jacket to reveal a bib with the words “Free Afghan Women’. “I wanted to show people what is possible,” she said afterwards in the briefest of media interviews.

Snoop Dogg officially opened the competition to the sound of his classic Drop It Like It’s Hot. The round-robin phase comprised four groups of four, in which each breaker faced off against the other with the top two in each section advancing straight to the knockout phase later on Friday.

A panel of nine judges – almost certainly the first officials in Olympic history to enter their seats via a group performance of the activity on which they were about to adjudicate – scored each breaker based on six criteria: technique, vocabulary (variety of moves), execution, performativity, musicality and originality.

16-year-ol