"Breaking or b-boying is generally misconstrued or incorrectly termed as '‘breakdancing'. Breakdancing is a term spawned from the loins of the media's philistinism, sciolism and naïveté at that time.

"With no true knowledge of the hip-hop diaspora but with an ineradicable need to define it for the nescient masses, the term breakdancing was born. Most breakers take great offense to the term."

So says the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory. And I for one am not going to disagree.

Actually it wasn’t quite true what I said earlier about understanding breaking. Or as aficionados call it, breakin'

That bit I get. It’s just the rest that I don't. But at least I’m not guilty here of sciolism - which I just looked up and which means "a superficial show of learning."

You know when you see an ant? And then suddenly you see ten, twenty, hundreds blithering all over the place and now they’re on your arm!!

Well that’s how it was with me trying to read up on what breaking is, and how it emerged into wider public consciousness.

I first settled on the fact that it was an athletic style of street dance originating from the African American community of the United States in the inner cities of New York and California.

But then it turned out it wasn’t just an African American thing. It was also a Latino/Hispanic thing.

Anyway, it originated in the 1970s and became mainstream early in the 1980s. Although in fact there was "evidence of this style of dancing" in Nigeria in 1959.

Oh, and Thomas Edison, whose CV includes credits as inventor of the phonograph, the light bulb and the motion picture camera, used the latter in 1898 to record a young street dancer performing "acrobatic head spins."

Trying to establish exactly what is involved in "breakin'" has proved similarly perplexing.

It is not to be confused with popping or locking. Although Jeff Chang, an American historian, journalist and music critic on hip hop music and culture, sees popping and locking as diverse styles "lumped together under the tag 'break dancing'."

He details popular styles which vary from place to place - "uprock" in Brooklyn, "locking" in Los Angeles, "boogaloo" and "popping" in Fresno, and "strutting" in San Francisco and Oakland.

And that’s not taking into account waving and tutting, liquid and digits. And turfing.

So breakin' - it’s confusin'…

I don’t necessarily think this is an age thing.

Who am I kidding? Of course it is. I can remember feeling too old when I first heard Never Mind The Bollocks by the Sex Pistols in November 1977. I was nearly 20.

My old classmate Kidder and I listened to it in his room in St John’s College shortly after he had bought it at Andy’s Records on Cambridge Market.

I remember thinking at the time how much the band would have hated us. We were not their audience. They would certainly have spat on us.

But I digress.

Breaking will make its Olympic debut at the Paris 2024 Games, where it will be staged along with other recently-included "youth" sports skateboarding and sport climbing, both of which made a first Olympic appearance at the Tokyo 2020 Games.

Breaking first appeared as a medal event at the Buenos Aires 2018 Youth Olympic Games and in February 2019, it was being proposed as a potential sport for the Paris Olympics.

Tony Estanguet, the Paris 2024 President, said at the time that new sports would make the Games "more urban" and "more artistic."

Estanguet was not present in person at the European Olympic Committees Seminar which took place in his city last Friday and Saturday, although he gave an update on Paris 2024 preparations via live link.

The French National Olympic and Sport Committee pushed the bateaux mouches out for the Gala Evening, where 15-year-old Slovakian ice hockey player Nela Lopušanová was awarded the eighth winter edition Piotr Nurowski Best European Young Athlete prize.

Chilled Moet awaited at the venue in the Bois de Boulogne, and an excellent four-piece band - guitar, double bass, drums and saxophone - garbed in self-consciously French outfits including berets played in the corner, accepting occasional plaudits with sang froid.

But the surprise event of the evening was the sudden appearance of a huge unit of a man in the announcing area – the MC – who was soon joined by two teams of four breakers, comprising b-boys and b-girls.

As the DJ did his funky thing, ritual battle commenced, with the dancers taking turns to amplify the music with movement. Astonishing, controlled, ebullient movement.

Somewhere in the ritual was a code which determined how long each individual tour de force would last before the would-be outperformer rose and retreated, often a little awkwardly after the consummately achieved moves, back to the ranks of their b-boy and b-girl compadres.

As the Big Unit stoked the atmosphere the noise level rose. Given the average age of assembled observers you could hardly call it Engagement With the Youth, as Thomas Bach might describe it. But there was some very enthusiastic jewellery-rattling going on. As John Lennon might have described it.

My subsequent attempts to understand more about what I had witnessed personally for the first time turned into scurrying ants. But I will retain the thrill of the witnessing.

Two observations. One of the b-girls got the highest decibel levels. In a sporting world where lopsided mixed events are getting tacked on here, there and everywhere this is a truly level mixed event. This featured when breaking was trialled at the 2018 Olympic Youth Games in Buenos Aires but will be not do so in Paris. Which is a pity.

Secondly, the idea of breaking as a sport still seems reductive. It is art more than sport. It is expression.

But as far as the Olympic Movement is concerned, breaking is, like its cousins skateboarding and sport climbing, a hugely popular expression. Since the second phase of Paris 2024 sales began on May 11, breakin' tickets have reportedly been flyin'…

And the chosen venue for the cousins when they all come out to play next summer, the Place de la Concorde, is going to be rockin'…