Breaking, commonly known as breakdancing, will make its debut at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

For those who think this and other relatively new sports, such as skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing, are odd choices for Olympic competitions, Taylor McKee begs to differ.

“The Olympic program will continue to change in years to come, with new sports added to reflect the sporting character of individual host nations,” says the Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Brock University, referring to a process instituted in 2020 where the host can propose additional events for their particular Olympics.

McKee says before petitioning the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to include a particular sport in the Games, the proposed sport is subject to rigorous judging and evaluation metrics as well as having to adhere to international anti-doping policies.

The process involves a wide array of officials from the IOC and national sporting bodies.

Despite this rigorous approach, defining sport and who is permitted to play is “notoriously fraught” with assumptions and subjective opinions, he says.

The culture of the day also influences what is considered to be sport.

“The continuing alteration of Olympic sports is an opportunity to maintain, or perhaps regain, cultural relevancy for generations less inclined to welcome the Games to their countries,” he says.

McKee refers to the “rich legacy of non-traditional ‘demonstration’ sports” that were popular in the past, including trampolining, trap shooting, dogsled racing, ski ballet, water-skiing and even live pigeon shooting at the 1900 Paris Olympics.

But determining what is and isn’t a “sport” to be included in the Olympics is a challenge spanning back to when the first modern Olympics began in 1896.

“It is curious that even in antiquity, what was considered ‘sport’ was very hard to define,” says Professor of Greek and Roman History Michael Carter, from the Department of Classics and Archaeology.

Every culture around the world, across time, has done what would be recognized now as sport, says Carter, and yet there was no word for ‘sport’ in antiquity.

In fact, many cultures and languages today use the English word ‘sport’ when there is no equivalent word otherwise.

“When this type of use of a lone word occurs in other cultures, it tells us that the word is an imported custom of sorts,” says Carter. “When you import a foreign word into a language, you are also importing meaning and potential bias.”

In the ancient world, the Games encompassed a physical contest governed by established rules and procedures with the aim of winning a competition.

Although all Greek men were encouraged to compete in Olympia for personal glory to show their true strength and worth to the Greek gods, the process privileged the elite and those who had time to train individually, Carter says.

“By competing and winning athletic competitions, people were perceived to be chosen by the Greek gods to be honoured for their excellence — it was not about working as team as we see now in modern day Olympics,” he says.

“A lot of the events that still exist today — long jump, 200-metre dash, wrestling — are based on what we knew in the late 1800s about the ancient Games when the Olympic movement was revived leading to the first early modern Olympics in Athens in 1896.”

In considering the new additions to the modern-day Olympics, Carter says a similar way of thinking was seen in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds through athletic events that included competitions in musical performances and poetry.

“What endures is the broadness of the definition and concept of sport and competition,” he says.