Let’s name the query settled: Breaking’s debut on the 2024 Olympic Video games confirms that, sure, dance could be thought of a sport. For essentially the most half, we’ve moved previous outdated stereotypes and collectively agree that dance is difficult each artistically and bodily. It’s now not an anomaly when dancers carry weights on the health club or mannequin health attire, as a result of dancers could be athletes, too.
Even with these similarities, dance and sports activities differ in stark methods. A few of the most notable contain funding and compensation. As dance reaches sport standing at an important multisport occasion on this planet, a sophisticated query looms: Will the Olympics assist dancers receives a commission like athletes?
Olympic athletes usually make the majority of their cash by sponsorships, not from successful medals. Simone Biles, essentially the most embellished gymnast of all time, was one of many highest-paid feminine athletes of 2023, making $7 million in sponsorships and $100,000 from her wage and winnings. However you don’t should be the GOAT or star in commercials to money in on the excitement: Athletes can commercialize their private social media presence and receives a commission to advertise services and products to their ballooning fanbase.
The 2024 Olympics might be a turning level for dancers who’re accustomed to creating a residing performing and instructing. “It adjustments all the pieces,” b-boy Alien Ness informed The New York Instances in October 2023. “Now it’s an Olympic gold medal. Now it’s a field of Wheaties. Now it’s your personal Nike shoe. It’s all the pieces that comes with that.” There’s technically nothing stopping dancers from utilizing their social media followings for #SponCon—loads do that already. However taking part within the Olympics comes with cachet and publicity that may change the scale of an athlete’s platform and make them a family title.
Breakers who have been well-known in small circles of affect will all of the sudden have their faces splashed throughout screens all around the world. The Olympian-to-pop-culture-figure pipeline is actual. After snowboarder Chloe Kim made her Olympic debut in 2018, for instance, Corn Flakes put her on a special-edition field, Mattel designed a Barbie in her likeness, and Nike featured her in a industrial that premiered throughout the Oscars. That’s actual cash. Might super-charismatic breakers like Workforce USA’s Sunny Choi or Victor Montalvo see an analogous enhance?
Even televising dance is progress for an trade that, outdoors of actuality competitions like “So You Assume You Can Dance,” usually depends on dwell experiences to generate a revenue. For the upcoming Summer season Video games, NBC will air eight hours of breaking, along with streaming medal occasions on its digital platform Peacock.
Olympic broadcast partnerships are the one best income for the Olympics. The 2020 Summer season Olympics in Tokyo introduced in additional than $3 billion in broadcast income, a gargantuan quantity. If the Olympic breaking broadcasts efficiently appeal to giant audiences, that may pave the way in which for extra—and extra profitable—dance onscreen.
Like dancers, athletes have quick skilled careers, however Olympic success can lengthen their shelf life: There’s a well-constructed off-ramp for Olympic athletes. The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, for instance, supplies sources to assist put together athletes for his or her careers post-Olympics, together with tuition help for persevering with training, skilled improvement, monetary literacy, and private branding applications. That’s along with top-tier medical insurance, entry to sports activities drugs clinics, and psychological well being care.
These sorts of perks are main monetary boosts for dancers, who are sometimes self-employed and paying lots of of {dollars} a month for medical insurance. If we’re proudly proclaiming that dancers are athletes, they need to have the ability to reap all of the monetary advantages that come together with it.
