I do not pay much attention to the Olympic games and never watch any event in real time. I tend to like only those events where the performances are measured using instruments and have little interest in those where people make judgments as to the difficulty, aesthetics, and so on. The events that interest me are the track and field ones and I sometimes watch clips of those events if I read that something interesting happened. The fact that I already know the result does not bother me. It is seeing top athletes pushing themselves to the limit that I find interesting, but not enough to devote more that a few minutes to it.
However, during the Paris Olympics this past summer, various news headlines registered in my consciousness in passing and I became vaguely aware that there had been some controversy involving the new event of breakdancing that was introduced for the first time, part of a trend by the people behind the Olympics of trying to attract younger viewers who do not find the traditional events interesting enough.
I was not interested enough to read up on what happened but then a few days ago I came across this article that piqued my curiosity.
Raygun Breaks the Olympics
Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, Molly Shannon, that little girl who burst into the room while her father was being interviewed on TV about Korea: words never do full justice to the greatest of physical comedians. That was also true of Rachael Gunn, performing under the nom de breakdancing Raygun while representing Australia at the Summer Olympics. Her eccentric moves and-let’s say unique-pacing prompted howls on social media, drawing comparisons between the athlete and Yogi Bear, or Elaine Benes.
Perhaps inevitably, the episode generated a bit of bad feeling: some viewers claimed that Raygun must be trolling or otherwise disrespecting her competitors; she has since said that she felt devastated by the backlash. But I propose that anger in either direction was misguided. It requires some online digging to find the full video of Gunn’s Olympic routine, but it’s worth the effort. Cue it up and feel the smile break across your face as Raygun struts onto the stage, decked out in a green windsuit, then marvel at her mad demonstration of human possibility, which produced perhaps the funniest photograph of the year, featuring Raygun in full T. rex mode as the judges look on, each bearing a slightly different expression of puzzlement.
The controversy involved an Australian breakdancer Rachel Gunn who competes under the name Raygun and her performance was criticized by breakdance enthusiasts who felt that she had brought the event into disrepute by making it look ridiculous. Some even went to so far as to argue that that was her intent, that she had deliberately done so, trolling just to get attention. This photo showing her in what looks like a T. Rex pose appeared widely.
You can see her routines in full by clicking on the link in the above quoted passage, where she competes against three other breakdancers in the preliminary rounds. This article presents her side of the story.
Rachael Gunn, the Olympic breaker who went viral for her dance performance at the Paris Games last month, has apologized to the breaking community for the backlash she brought upon it.
In an interview with Australian current affairs show “The Project” broadcast Wednesday, Gunn, widely known as Raygun, said she is “very sorry for the backlash that the community has experienced” as a result of her performance.
The 37-year-old university lecturer did not register a single point across her Olympic battles against breakers from the United States, France and Lithuania in August, losing 18-0 in all three rounds.
…Her performance consisted of moves including a kangaroo hop, a backward roll and various contortions with her body while lying or crawling on the floor.
In her interview with “The Project,” Gunn said her breaking style is “just a different approach” to the sport.
…Gunn said she qualified for the Paris Olympics by winning the Oceania championships, but added that she was “super nervous” to compete in the 2024 Games.
“I knew that I was going to get beaten, and I knew that people were not going to understand my style and what I was going to do,” she said. “The odds were against me, that’s for sure.”
Breakdancing will not be an event in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Meanwhile Raygun has announced retirement from competing in future, citing the toll the online hate had taken on her.
She said that her moves were meant to signify distinctive aspects of Australia. Clearly her critics either did not get it or were not persuaded that she was being genuine. I did not see anything objectionable in her performance but then what do I know about breakdancing? But it is unfortunate that she became yet another victim of the ‘two-minute hate’ that the internet is infamous for, where people pile on someone for doing something that hardly merits such wholesale condemnation. In this case, it has driven Gunn out of doing something that she clearly loves and was not doing anyone any harm.
Up until now I have avoided this video. I am curious as to what makes you, someone who wouldn’t normally care both watch and comment on it, do so for months after the fact. So… I looked. …erurghghhh….
Ballet is not the same as ballet folklorico or ballroom dancing or disco dancing or minuette. These can be distinguished even if you don’t have the eye for it.
I have no idea if this ‘offends the whole breaking community’ or not. But it doesn’t look at all like break dancing to me. I have seen five year olds at ballet recitals with more grace and skill than this. I have skill and training at ballet. Most places I have lived have been urban California, and while I have never done any of the breakdancing moves other than the robot and the worm which briefly becaume universal I have seen a lot of it both spontaneous and commercially produced.
Even if she were aiming (as she is *claiming* to do) to introduce new style to break dancing, she’s IMO doing a poor job of dancing altogether. She isn’t including *any* of the classical break dancing moves or if she is she’s going about it so badly I can’t tell. So it’s not like she’s doing an improvisation on a theme. She appears to me to be up there, being randomly and childishly spastic. If she isn’t spastic, then I can see why someone might be offended that she was making fun of them as a group if she thinks ‘being childishly spastic’ is part of their dance genre.
Now, part of breakdancing is the aggression, just like in a mosh pit. Part of breakdancing is making fun of the other guy. Maybe everyone else just didn’t go far enough at being miserably bad at it in order to pull of the aggression and making fun part.
Is what she is doing perfectly fine, for just looking at an entertainer on a stage? Yep! …I’m sure you are right.
I am baffled as to how she came be on the our team. Not curious enough to go searching, but I have nevertheless heard lurid tales of using influence to rig that outcome. I don’t think I believe them, but… She is definitely quite bad a break dancing. Australia does not seem to have much of an interest in it -- certainly not to the degree France does -- but I’m sure there are better than her somewhere in amongst our population.
The interesting thing here is that usually, when someone it objectively incredibly bad at a sport, the Olympics is the place where people will rally behind them and support them. I’m thinking here in particular of people like the Jamaican bobsled team immortalised in the movie “Cool Runnings”, the British ski-jumper Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards, who also had a movie made about him, and Eric “the Eel” Moussambani. The Olympic audience, and the world sporting audience in general, are actually pretty good at rooting for an underdog, even/especially if they’re not very good.
However… they’re also pretty good at spotting a cheat. Not a drug cheat, Bod knows, but someone who isn’t there in the Olympic spirit. The example I’m thinking of here is Elizabeth Swaney, a (by international standards) at best mediocre American skier who nevertheless studied the rulebook carefully and based on her grandparents nationality systematically gamed the qualifying system to allow her to represent Hungary at the 2018 Winter Olympics in halfpipe skiing. She made a mockery of the event, simply skiing down the halfpipe not attempting to do any tricks. Even she knew she was objectively shit at the event, she just wanted to be their by any means necessary, lacking the necessary talent to qualify for her home country OR the home country of her parents. Go on Youtube to see her performance -- it’s hilarious listening to the commentators trying to find something to say about her non-performance.
Australia is a country with a population of over 26 million people, a country that takes sport very, very seriously, and is internationally competitive in many of the biggest. You don’t have to know anything about breakdancing to know that that woman is NOT the best breakdancer in Australia. It’s inconceivable that she’s even one of the top… 50? 100? breakdancers in the country. And yet she was the one chosen to represent them.
It’s certainly not unreasonable to wonder how an artform with deep roots in relatively poor ethnic minority communities came to be represented, for Australia (a country pretty comfortable with its racism) by a white woman who’d had the spare time and resources to do a PhD thesis on breakdancing.
Or put another way -- it’s obvious that the reason she got her place is one or more of:
-- white privilege
-- gaming the system
-- corruption in the judging process
-- cheating
-- the entire nation of Australia, a place otherwise mad keen on sport of all kinds, hates breakdancing and the people who do it and they wanted to expose them to ridicule
No conceivable judging process with any pretension of fairness could turn her up as the best Australia had to offer. The public knew that, and no amount of people applauding her “bravery” or bemoaning the backlash could change it.
But didn’t Gunn qualify for the Olympics by winning the Oceania Breakdancing Championships? Surely that gives her some legitimacy?
I don’t really “get” dance at all, but this smells a lot like the “whitewashing” that happened to both Jazz and Rock and Roll back in the 20th century. Are the Oceania Breakdancing Championships well represented by people from marginalized groups, or are White people using their usual locust swarming to freeze POCs out, I wonder.
@moarscienceplz
You can see for yourself:
https://www.worlddancesport.org/Competitions/Ranking/Oceania-Championship-Sydney-Adult-Breaking-1vs1-B-Boys-60317
https://www.worlddancesport.org/Competitions/Ranking/Oceania-Championship-Sydney-Adult-Breaking-1vs1-B-Girls-60318
Given that Australia is about 75-80% white, I’d say it looks like white people are relatively under-represented among B-Boys, but closer to evenly represented among B-Girls. We can debate whether breaking is or should be as “ethnic” in Australia as it is in the US, but I don’t see the kind of whitewashing that you are talking about.
The judges were overwhelmingly non-white.
Yes.
Given the quality of her performance, isn’t a more rational interpretation that it reduces the legitimacy of those Championships, if someone so self-evidently terrible at breakdancing could win it?
Vladimir Putin won the Russian presidential election in 2024, with a whopping 88% of the vote. Does that give him legitimacy? Or does it make you assume the election perhaps wasn’t entirely fair?
And if you’re not predisposed to look at the evidence and assume shenanigans, why not? Just because she got some hate online?
Can you honestly, having watched her performance, tell me you believe that to be the best female breakdancer in Australia? Or even one of the top 20 or so? Or is some flaw in the qualification process a more sensible assumption?
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that much to most people -- this woman was a comedic sideshow to an otherwise inspiring festival of excellence. The BBC still has snippets of the best moments of the Olympics available on the iPlayer streaming platform, and it’s great to catch up on events that slipped by in the background -- the “windsurfing” (which looks nothing like it did when I was doing it -- boards riding up out of the water on foils, pulled along by kites, it’s spectacular), the badminton, the rock climbing, the list goes on. You can see the breaking final, and it’s brilliant. The problem is, this woman’s performance was all anyone was talking about. I know a LOT of people for whom her clip was the only bit of Olympic breakdancing they saw, or likely will ever see -- to them, that’s the event. And if you’re into breakdancing, that’s a tragedy. I dread to think what it must be like to be one of the women she beat to that place in the team, or some up-and-coming Australian b-girl who had thoughts of making it to the 2032 games.
I did a lot of research on this a while back, including reading Raygun’s scholarly work.
IMO one thing that makes the story confusing, is that the most viral parts of her performance (such as the kangaroo hop) are actually the best and most entertaining parts. But since people hear her performance was so bad it got zero points, and since it’s hard to even find videos of the full performance, people assume that stuff like the kangaroo hop was what made it bad. That leads to a narrative where her best moves are perceived as a mockery of the sport, or trolling for attention. But like, I watched the finalist performances, they all involved some creative expression!
The real story is that Raygun is just kind of a mediocre breaker--by Olympic standards. She comes from a small and isolated breaking scene where competition is not very tough. And so what? I think the internet has been extremely unfair to her.
I gotta reply to a bunch of these comments, because I happen to know about this.
@seachange #1,
From what I’ve heard, these breaking competitions are 100% improvised. They don’t know the music beforehand, and they receive points for tailoring their performance to the music. That said, I’m sure they practice individual moves.
@holms #2,
You can actually find recordings of Raygun’s qualifying match! Many people say that Raygun’s performance looks worse than her competitor, and with my inexpert eyes I tend to agree. But there are also opaque factors to the scoring, for example they dock points for reusing moves from earlier in the competition. In any case, I think the other person also would have performed poorly if they had gone to the Olympics instead.
@sonofrojblake #3,
While Australia takes sports very seriously, most would not see breaking as a “proper” sport, so it apparently lacks popular (and financial) support. Nobody hated Raygun more than Australians, from what I saw.
@invivoMark #6,
In Raygun’s paper she talks about how geographically dispersed Australia is. So I expect there’s a bit of class privilege at play in who can afford to travel to national competitions. But I wouldn’t blame Raygun for that. And it’s not like breaking is so exclusive to POC that it makes sense to attack individual white athletes.
That was the first I actually watched any of it. I had seen all the memes and such, and figured it was stills taken out of context, like the ones of Beyonce during one of her Superbowl(?) performances.
I don’t know, i’m not a great judge of this sorta thing, I certainly couldn’t do what she did, but I don’t think it was inherently bad, just not as good as her competition. They were much more energetic/athletic then her, but they were all also much younger then her (I think the oldest was 21, if I remember correctly?), and that would certainly play a part in the available energy/athleticism.
#4 Mano
I would say that fact reflects poorly on Australia’s level of competence and/or interest in the sport more than anything else.
She wins gold for “best unintentionally hilariously awful Olympic performance”, but getting the entire event removed is absolutely due to her somehow being on an Olympic stage and demonstrating moves that are absolutely not breakdancing. The fact that she appears to be dressed as an employee at Subway Sandwiches did not help her performance.
She looked like a kid who is trying to emulate actual breakdancing with all that rolling around on the floor.
I thoroughly enjoyed this reaction video to her performance by two black American men from Tennessee. It is slightly difficult to understand their Southern accent in the introduction, but it is fine when they start opining about her dancing. I’m still laughing at their names for some of her moves like ‘church-lady booty scoot’, and ‘rubber ducky’.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ghaR0KsJOV4&pp=ygUZQmxhY2tkdWRlc3JlYWN0IHRvIFJheWd1bg%3D%3D
Surreal postscript:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/dec/08/raygun-inspired-musical-cancelled-in-sydney-after-breakdancer-rachael-gunn-complained
“lawyers had concerns it would damage the controversial breaker’s reputation”
They appear not to be aware what her reputation is.
“the B-girl’s legal team had instructed her against doing the kangaroo dance because Gunn “owns” it.
“That one did puzzle me -- I mean, that’s an Olympic-level dance,” she said.
How would I possibly be able to do that without any formal breakdancing training?”
Comedy gold, right there.