How does Olympic breaking work?
Dancers will compete in one-on-one battles consisting of two 60-second throw downs (three in the knockout phase), with DJs spinning the music, a host on the microphone and nine judges who vote at the end of each battle to decide the winner.
A DJ selects the music and decides which tracks will be played during the battle while breakers freestyle or improvise their routines, taking it in turns to show their moves and receiving marks for technique, vocabulary (the variety of moves incorporated), execution, musicality and originality.
Instead of scoring each of these criteria, judges use a digital slider, sliding towards the breaker who is winning the head-to-head match-up. So, if breaker A is performing better than breaker B, judges will move the slider towards their side.
Each of the five categories accounts for 20% of the final score. Based on the average of the sliders in these five criteria, one breaker is named the winner of each round.