21 Jul 2024

Breakers weigh pressure and excitement as they make their Olympic debut at the Paris Games

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By NOREEN NASIR, Associated Press

Logan Edra knows her journey to securing a spot as one of the breakers on the U.S. team heading to the Olympics took longer than some expected.

The 21-year-old Filipina American didn’t officially qualify for the Paris Games until last month. It was the last competition for her to earn an Olympic spot despite being of one of the world’s best breakers — more commonly referred to as breakdancers.

“As much as we have people around us that are encouraging or part of the hype, it’s still a lonely journey. No one really knows what you’re going through except for you,” said Edra, who is ranked No. 14 in the world and had a meteoric rise on the global breaking scene since 2018.

She was expected to defend her championship at the 2022 Red Bull BC One World Final in New York, but was beat out in the intense final round by India Dewi (b-girl India) from the Netherlands before dominating in the Olympic Qualifier Series in Budapest in June.

With all the anticipation around breaking officially debuting as an Olympic sport, Edra and her U.S. teammates are navigating the pressure that comes with performing a uniquely American artform while facing tough competition from what has now become a global phenomenon.

Nonetheless, Edra, known as b-girl Logistx, using the term for female breakers and the nickname her father gave her as a child, is focused on staying grounded and embracing the challenges as she prepares for the global stage.

“I value this goal,” she said, “but not because of what it comes with. More so because of how I’ve grown through it.”

FILE – United States’ Logistx battles Japan’s Riko for a third placing match of the Breaking B-Girls Finals for the 2024 Olympic Qualifier Series held in Shanghai, Sunday, May 19, 2024. Her hope as she heads to Paris is that she doesn’t lose her passion and purpose amid the pressures of performing on a global stage. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

An American art up against tough global competition

The breakers from Team USA have the added responsibility of representing the country where breaking, and the broader culture of hip-hop, originated. Hip-hop was born in the Bronx in the 1970s and with it came the rise of breaking, one of the four foundational elements of the movement. The other elements are DJing, MCing or rapping and graffiti “writing.”

“I’m really excited to represent a whole country, but I’m more excited to represent my dance, my artform and I’m super excited to bring the hip-hop culture to the Olympics,” said Victor Montalvo, or b-boy Victor, one of the U.S. breakers. “We’re going to bring something new to the table. We’re going to bring a vibe, we’re going to bring that peace, love, unity and having fun.”

In the U.S., breaking is often considered to have “died out in the 80s,” Edra said. But globally, the culture is thriving.

Some of the world’s best breakers — and top Olympic contenders — are from countries around the world. The who’s who of the best hail from Canada (Philip Kim, or “b-boy Phil Wizard”) to Japan (Shigeyuki Nakarai, or “b-boy Shigekix”) to France (Danis Civil, or “b-boy Dany”) to China (Qingyi Liu, or “b-girl 671”) to Lithuania (Dominika Banevič, or “b-girl Nicka”), among others.

Edra and Montalvo, along with fellow U.S. breakers, Sunny Choi (b-girl Sunny) and Jeffrey Louis (b-boy Jeffro), are not just focused on nailing their moves, they’re serving as ambassadors of the birthplace of a culture and lifestyle now deemed an Olympic sport.

The Paris Games could be their only shot at an Olympic medal — breaking won’t be one of the sports at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

Preserving the roots of the dance

Montalvo learned breaking from his father and uncle, twin brothers who were breaking pioneers in Mexico. Currently ranked No. 5 in the world, he cites their instruction as learning “from the roots, from the originals.”

“It’s fascinating and gratifying to see something we did for fun and now see it become an international sport,” said Douglas “Dancin’ Doug” Colón, a b-boy of the first generation of breakers from Harlem. He was 15 when he started breaking at parties in the recreation room of an apartment building in the Bronx.

“For us, it was a release, growing up as poor kids in New York City. We had a lot of fire in our energy, that’s why it was so raw,” he said.

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Hip-hop celebrated its 50th anniversary last summer. Since its founding, the culture has expanded to a multibillion dollar global industry. The expansion and growing popularity of the sport has led to skepticism of attempts to co-opt the culture and commercialize it while imposing a rigid competitive structure and moving further away from the spirit of breaking that has historically been rooted in local communities.

Before there were global competitions and large stages, there was only the cypher – a circle formed by breakers in which b-boys and b-girls enter, one after another, to dance and battle. Unlike organized sporting events, there are fewer rules and restrictions.

Colón isn’t worried about the changes.

“There are still cyphers. There will always be cyphers,” he said. “Everything evolves. Brothers will say: ‘we used to dance. They don’t dance anymore, they go straight to the breaking part.’ But that’s what it is now. They kept evolving and now it’s more acrobatic, more competitive. It’s like the difference between a Model T and a Lamborghini. It keeps evolving.”

A win for visibility

Judges at the Olympics will score breakers based on the Trivium judging system, which scores breakers on creativity, personality, technique, variety, performativity and musicality. The scores can fluctuate throughout the battle, based on how breakers respond to their opponents.

In all, 32 breakers – 16 women and 16 men – will compete over two days, August 9 and 10, at the iconic Place de la Concorde, a public square in Paris that is being transformed into an open-air stadium for the Olympics. The outdoor venue is meant to be a nod to the culture of street battles in breaking.

For Team USA, the hope is that the spotlight at the Paris Games brings more respect and resources to breaking back home.

“From us being in the Olympics, it’s going to grow,” said Montalvo. “There’s going to be a new generation of kids that are going to want to do it… and you just need a dance floor and your body and self expression.”

21 Jul 2024

Other voices: Vance seals the arrival of big-government ‘conservatism’

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Americans had reason to fear for the future even before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. One hopes this enormity, together with respect for its innocent victims, will urge elected leaders to keep the risk of instability and political violence front of mind. In particular, campaigns need to talk less about the evil of their opponents and think harder about policy.

Policy did indeed come up at the Republican Party’s national convention this week, but not in a good way. Energized by the weekend’s outrage, Republicans celebrated both a new policy platform and the choice of Senator JD Vance as the former president’s running mate.

The choices go together all too well. Republicans are shifting toward a new kind of inward-looking big-government conservatism — “national conservatism,” as its advocates prefer. Unless something changes, this benighted program’s electoral prospects look good.

Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party stood for market liberalism and strong national defense. The Trump administration lacked such guiding principles, and relied instead on the president’s certainty that he knew best. He settled on protectionism, unfunded tax cuts with enormous deficits, chauvinistic strutting and a carelessly transactional approach to U.S. alliances. To its shame, the old Republican Party looked on impotently, hoping this would pass.

It didn’t, and the emerging new party has no reservations. The choice of Vance for vice president underlines the point. Some plausible deputies might’ve tried to restrain Trump’s illiberal and narrowly nationalist instincts. Vance, henceforth Trump’s presumed successor, seems more likely to fuel them.

He agrees with Trump that U.S. aid to Ukraine should be scaled down and NATO has been allowed to lean too heavily on U.S. support: “No, I don’t think that we should pull out of NATO, and no, I don’t think that we should abandon Europe,” he has said. “But yes, I think that we should pivot.” This undermines the alliance that the old Republican Party recognized as vital for national security.

Trump, Vance and the new platform are also aligned on domestic policy: Seal the border and undertake the largest deportation program in American history. Stop outsourcing and make the U.S. a manufacturing superpower. Build infrastructure. Rebuild U.S. cities (“making them safe, clean and beautiful again”). Rule out entitlement reform and cut workers’ taxes. Whether Trump sees the contradictions is debatable. Vance does, and he embraces them nonetheless.

A former Never Trumper, Vance has moved to and fro on policy as electoral math has dictated, but he seems genuinely suspicious of commerce and private enterprise. He has blamed worsening fiscal shortfalls on trade (“we shipped millions of good jobs to China and other countries”) and favors higher taxes on the companies responsible. He says immigration suppresses wages. (It doesn’t.)

No fan of big tech, he commends the Federal Trade Commission’s aggressive new approach to antitrust enforcement. Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters union, was granted a prime-time speaking slot at the convention; he praised Vance and a “growing group” of GOP officials for “listening to unions and standing up to corporations.”

When it comes to market forces versus government intervention, of course, the populist right often agrees with the populist left. Thanks to the Republican realignment, voters lose twice over. The absence of small-government conservatives shifts economic policy unopposed toward ill-conceived interventions, and cultural friction between social liberals and social conservatives, which is hard to assuage, comes to dominate the country’s politics.

America’s political system requires a willingness to tolerate disagreement. Its prosperity requires close attention to the defects of populist economics. The new Republicans have other priorities.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

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21 Jul 2024

David Brooks: What Democrats need to do now

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In 2016, Make America Great Again was just a slogan — or at best a spasm of resentments and instincts about issues such as immigration. Over the last eight years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends former President Donald Trump.

Across the Western world, right-wing parties have ceased to be parties of the business elites and have become working-class parties. MAGA is the worldview that accords with this shifting reality. It has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters respect.

JD Vance is an embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview — with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements, free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration. In Milwaukee this week, with Vance as Trump’s pick for vice president, it became clear how thoroughly MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.

If Democrats want to beat MAGA, it’s not enough to say: “Orange man bad.” Talking endlessly about Jan. 6 does no good. If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.

At its best, what is MAGA, anyway?

Well, in any society, there is a legitimate tension between security and dynamism. In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators. As Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., argued in Compact Magazine this week, “The C-suite long ago sold out the United States, shuttering factories in the homeland and gutting American jobs.”

To those who rightly feel buffeted by vast and destabilizing forces, Trump emerges as a kind of Aaron Sorkin character: “You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.” He offers security so people can get on with their lives.

Now, the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.

The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness. Successive waves of immigrants found a vast continent of fertile fields and bustling cities. In 1910, Henry van Dyke, who later became the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands and Luxembourg, wrote a book called “The Spirit of America,” in which he observed that “the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.” In the 20th century, Luigi Barzini, an Italian observer, argued that Americans have a zeal for continual self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone.”

Many foreign observers saw us, and we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common future. Our sense of home was not rooted in blood-and-soil nationalism; our home was something we were building together. Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.

MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.” MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.

Viewed from the traditional American abundance mindset, MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.

If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century. It should be said that social dynamism is more complicated than it appears at first blush. It’s not just getting on your Harley and hitting the open road. It’s not really about rugged individualism or the libertarian version of freedom as the absence of constraint.

My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from psychologist John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.

Here’s where they have a potentially good story to tell. Americans can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like Vladimir Putin at bay. Americans can’t be secure if the border is in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a sense that the government has things under control. Americans can’t be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that Democrats largely built are so important.

But what Democrats really need to do, in my view, is to offer people a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete. American dynamism was turbocharged by the construction of the transcontinental railway, the creation of the land grant colleges, the GI Bill and President Joe Biden’s successful efforts to revive our industrial base in the American Midwest.

Personally, I wish Democrats would spend less time on dumb, reactionary policies like rent control. That reeks of panic in the Biden campaign. I wish they would champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my New York Times colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.

Democrats need to take on their teachers unions and commit to dynamism in the field of education. They need to stand up to protectionism, not join the stampede. Raising tariffs, as Trump wants to do, would not only raise costs on U.S. consumers, it would also breed laziness and mediocrity within those sectors cosseted from competition. Democrats need to throttle back the regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled innovation.

If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric — elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business. They need to tap back into the more traditional American aspiration: We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can create a fluid, mobile society.

Economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less. Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and dynamism.”

Strain is getting at the core point that aspiration is not like a brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that can be fed or dampened. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen underlined the point a few years ago: “The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”

At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, I have heard a lot of patriotism, but it was the patriotism of nostalgia, not the patriotism of hope. That leaves an opening for the Democrats who gather in Chicago next month.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

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21 Jul 2024

Pain and pleasure: BMX racers weigh the risks and rewards playing the Olympics’ most dangerous game

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By DAVE SKRETTA, AP Sports Writer

Alise Willoughby remembers where she was when the phone rang. She had just returned home to Minnesota to take part in a charity event, and the best BMX racer of her generation was on her way to Target Field, where she was supposed to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before a Twins game.

Her husband, Sam, was supposed to be on the trip, too. But after missing out on a medal at the Rio Olympics three weeks earlier, he decided to stay in California, and begin working to rectify the situation at the Tokyo Games.

It was on a seemingly benign portion of the BMX track in Chula Vista, where the couple had trained for years, that the future they both imagined changed in a blink. Sam was warming up over the rhythm section, a mellow stretch of rolling humps, when the Australian fell backward out of a wheelie, landing on the top of his head. He lay there motionless as the father of a junior rider, who happened to be an EMT, rushed over and began giving him a head-to-toe examination.

The innocent crash had unimaginable repercussions. Paramedics canceled the inbound ambulance in favor of a helicopter, which whisked him to San Diego, where surgeons delivered the news: He had broken his back. He was paralyzed.

“It was such a fluke,” said Alise Willoughby, who eight years later is among the favorites to win gold at the Paris Olympics next month. “It was a little routine thing. Then he made a mistake on something he did every day for 10 years prior, you know? So it’s like, things sometimes just happen.”

They happen more in BMX racing than perhaps any other Olympic sport.

And it begs the question: Why do riders do it?

The answer seems to be different for everyone. Alise Willoughby is pushed by a burning desire to win Olympic gold, which she has missed out on in three straight Summer Games. Cameron Wood, who will be making his Olympic debut in Paris, is driven by the competition, to see where he stacks up.

They know the risks. They understand them. Everyone in the sport does.

But they also believe they are outweighed by the rewards.

“You can hate something and you can blame it, but at the same time, we obviously love what we do, and it’s our livelihood,” Alise Willoughby said. “Sam and I met through it. It’s given as much as it’s taken. So it’s just — it’s just people who love the sport.”

The beauty and the barbary

BMX racing is often described as NASCAR on two wheels, only stock car racing is probably safer. The discipline, which was added to the Olympic program in 2008 in Beijing, involves eight riders at a time flying out of a starting gate, elbow-to-elbow down a steep ramp, and into a course filled with sharp, banked corners, rhythmic bumps and high-speed straightaways.

Races take all of 40 seconds. Crashes happen. They are frequent, in fact, and injuries happen. Devastating ones.

They are expected, too. During the BMX competition three years ago at the Tokyo Games, five teams of medics surrounded the course at Ariake Urban Sports Park. Three ambulances waited nearby, ready to speed to the nearest hospital.

They were busy.

FILE – Medics prepare to carry Connor Fields, of the United States, away on a stretcher after he crashed in the men’s BMX Racing semifinals at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Friday, July 30, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan. His injuries were numerous: torn shoulder ligaments, a torn bicep, broken ribs, a collapsed lung. But most serious was what was diagnosed as a subarachnoid hemorrhage and subdural hematoma — essentially, bleeding on the brain. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)

There were several crashes over the course of three days. But none as serious as the one involving Connor Fields, at the time the defending Olympic champion.

The American was racing into the first corner in a semifinal when he clashed wheels with a French rider, sending him down. Two more riders fell on him. Fields briefly tried to sit up, then lost consciousness, and would not wake again for three days.

“There’s no way to check this,” Fields said, “but I might be the only athlete to both win the Olympics and nearly die at one.”

His injuries were numerous: torn shoulder ligaments, a torn bicep, broken ribs, a collapsed lung. But most serious was what was diagnosed as a subarachnoid hemorrhage and subdural hematoma — essentially, bleeding on the brain.

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Fields spent a week in a Tokyo hospital where, during the height of the pandemic, nobody spoke English well enough to tell him what happened. He awoke to 500-plus text messages, from everyone he knew, all saying they were praying for him. His parents, who were unable to travel to Japan because of COVID-19 restrictions, were largely in the dark.

“There was a lot of misinformation floating around. And there wasn’t an update,” Field said. “I’m friends with Kurt Busch, the NASCAR driver, and he owns a plane. He offered to fly my parents over, and it went high up the chain. But the Japan government basically said, ‘Nope, you can’t come over.’ So my parents just had to wait.”

Team USA doctors eventually were admitted to the hospital and helped him understand what had happened. Fields finally was cleared to fly back to the U.S., where he spent another month in a rehabilitation facility in Utah.

Fields ultimately recovered from the injures and was cleared to ride again. But he decided the risk was no longer worth the reward, and he opted for retirement instead of pushing ahead toward the Paris Games.

“There’s inherent risks in pretty much every sport,” said Fields, who is busy now as a BMX ambassador, hosts a TV show back home in Nevada and delivers keynote addresses. “When I was cleared, there were no restrictions. I could go compete again. I had to sit on it and really think, ‘Am I willing to take the risk again?’ And you know, the answer this time was no.”

The drama of danger

BMX racing was added to the Olympic program in an effort to embrace more youth-driven sports, such as surfing, climbing and, in Paris, the debut of breakdancing. Many of them also have risks, though they hardly carry the same ramifications.

The closest comparisons could be at the Winter Games.

Serious injuries are frequent in Alpine skiing, where World Cup-level racers reach 70 mph (110 kph), along with ski jumping, snowboarding and speedskating. Sliding sports also carry inherent risk: During the 2010 Vancouver Games, luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia was killed during a training crash.

“The danger might be there a little more in our sport than in others, but it’s just that, you know, it’s competitive,” said Wood, one of the two men racing BMX for the U.S. in Paris. “The adrenaline that comes with it, the competitive nature as well. The head-to-head aspect of the sport. I think we all understand and have come to terms with the fact that there’s risk involved.

“But when the day comes up, you kind of just tap into this competitive mindset and you have to switch that off, because if you do have that and if you take the gate with that thought in your head, it’s probably not going to end up well.”

That is something the 22-year-old Wood has had to learn. He avoided serious crashes for the first three years of his career. Then came a World Cup race last June, when a heavy fall left him with a fractured shoulder.

Wood had surgery, only to hurt it again multiple times as he chased a spot on the Olympic team. It still causes him pain to this day, but Wood put off any more surgery until after the Paris Games.

The dream of a gold medal hanging around his neck was too important to him.

“My outlook changed dramatically, though,” he said. “I did feel for a long time, you know, taking these hard hits, I was a little bit invincible. Mine was kind of a nonchalant-looking crash. But it does open your eyes a little bit, right? You do realize how intricate the sport is. And you know, sometimes you’re not going to be able to get up and walk away to the next one.”