I mostly ignore the Olympics, but my husband purchased access, and I sat down with him to watch one thing: the women’s breakdancing quarterfinals (see final battle). I didn’t know anything about breaking, but it was impressive to watch nonetheless. It was only later that I heard about the Aussie competitor Rachael Gunn (“Raygun”), whose earlier performance got memeified, and went viral on TikTok.
It’s hard to find publicly available “neutral” clips of her performance, but some options are provided here. Or, if you just want the meme version, I put a couple gifs below.
Raygun is, evidently, not in the same league as her competitors–and I think that’s more clear when you go beyond the memes to watch the full performances (the kangaroo hop is good actually). My husband remarked that sometimes there are Olympic competitors who are considerably worse than their peers, because they come from countries whose qualifying competitions have low participation rates. But Raygun’s legendary performance made it to my eyes and made me smile, so that’s certainly a kind of success.
Then I heard that Rachael Gunn has a PhD in Cultural Studies, and wrote a thesis about breakdancing, “Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl’s experience of B-boying“. This piqued my interest, because while I am definitely a tourist with regard to breaking, I have plenty of experience reading social science papers (including one other about dance). Although, rather than reading her 345-page thesis, I read “The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The Possibilities and politics of sportification“, coauthored with independent anthropologist Lucas Marie and published in 2023.
Paper summary
Gunn and Marie write about breaking from an insider perspective, having participated in breaking since 2011 and 1999 (!) respectively. They also draw upon in-depth interviews with 12 other experienced breakers in the Australian breaking scene.
They explain some of the larger context. Despite Australia’s small population, it tends to earn a lot of Olympic medals, a point of national pride. But breaking doesn’t meet many of the expectations for Olympic sports, being largely practiced by people of color (as opposed to white men with idealized muscular bodies), and being an artistic practice without clear winners. So within Australia, the idea of breaking at the Olympics was overwhelmingly considered an embarrassment and mockery.
Australia is also very large geographically. This results in a bunch of loosely connected localized breaking scenes with different cultures and styles. There are national jams and competitions once or twice a year, but people have to travel far to these, and it’s estimated there are only 400 breakers in the national scene. These events usually run at a loss, because of the expense of flying in judges and teachers from the international community, and the lack of public support.
When asked about the inclusion of breaking in the Olympics, Australian breakers were excited about the potential for greater legitimacy, as well as financial sponsorship. The Olympics also brings a level of gender equality that was otherwise lacking in the space. However, they expressed concerns about potential loss of culture. For example, the sponsor Red Bull popularized 1v1 battles, to the exclusion of “cyphers” (a generally non-competitive practice where people stand in a circle and take turns improvising in the middle). They traded the rock and funk music for more generic (copyright-free) beats. And the competitive structure discourages “specialists” in favor of “all-rounders” who can check off everything judges look for.
Breakers also had some more specific complaints, such as the Olympics Committee not clearly communicating to information about qualifying events. The Oceania qualifying competition was run by the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF), who required that judges are not currently competing or teaching. One interviewee said this was impractical under local circumstances, because the people most qualified to be judges were making money by teaching and running workshops.
Incidentally, I’ve also seen the WDSF criticized in mainstream media for being unqualified to judge breaking. And some people found Raygun’s final match in the qualifying competition, and have argued that she should have lost. So, I would just point out that whether there are or aren’t problems with the WDSF, that’s hardly Raygun’s fault!
Concluding thoughts
Something I appreciated about this paper is that it doesn’t lean on the concept of “authenticity” to make its argument. What is authentic can differ between countries, and even within different parts of Australia. Authentic practice can change over time, and so the changes brought on by Olympic breaking are not necessarily “bad”. But naturally, breakers would like to have some agency in those changes.
Having a better understanding of the context, Raygun’s performance is not particularly surprising. Like I initially suspected, it’s a region where participation rates are low, probably especially so for women. I don’t know Raygun’s precise motivations for her performance, but she was keenly aware of the drawbacks of emphasizing competition over personal expression, and of the risk of styles becoming homogenized. The expressiveness of her dance is readily apparent, and she drew attention to the Australian breaking scene, so that seems like a win for her.
It feels like every Olympics, there’s a controversy of some sort—like what is it this time, people are attacking a cis woman because they think she’s trans? But I usually don’t touch those issues, because I’m confused by a more fundamental question: why do we have sports at all?
More to the point, why broadcast sports? You can play basketball with a few friends, but that is not at all the same as professional basketball, an activity directly experienced by a tiny number of people, and spectated by the rest. We watch professionals precisely because they can do things few people can, but this makes it impossible to represent sports as they are most commonly experienced. The article by Gunn and Marie had me reflecting on the interface between local community practice and globalized performance—the friction between sport and its commodification.
The best reason to have sports (other than fun) is because it should inspire us to engage in physical activity, which is healthy.
To me, that’s the most important reason for allowing trans athletes to compete with others of their gender. Not counting mental health, the biggest health disparities that trans and gender diverse people face are heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. A lack of physical exercise and tobacco use are significant risk factors associated with being trans, and social stigma is the biggest barrier trans people consistently face to engaging in team sports.
Is it “fair” to allow trans people to compete with others of their gender? I don’t fucking care, and neither should anyone who actually does (and doesn’t just pretend to) care about the health of trans people. Increasing representation of trans people in high-level competitive sports would inspire more trans people to engage in physical activity, and that’s far more important.
@invivoMark,
That’s the conclusion I always come to as well. The value of sports is in physical activity and play, and the value in high-level competition is inspiring participation in sports. Competitions are not “fair” however, as they exclude the vast majority of participants, and do not resemble sports as typically practiced. In a high-level competitive context, Raygun is “bad” and deserves exclusion, even though I’m guessing in a local community context she would be considered good.
But even if participation is not “fair”, representation still matters, in the same way that we’d like to see diversity among famous actors–another very exclusive group.
Just one quibble: would everyone PLEASE stop calling it “breaking?” It’s BREAKDANCING.
We all say “figure-skating,” not “figuring;” we all say “speed-skating,” not “speeding;” we all say “beach volleyball,” not “beaching” or “beachball” or whatever. C’mon, guys, it’s just one more damn syllable and ten times the clarity!
Breaking is the preferred term in basically every source I’ve found.
@Raging Bee
Petition to rename all equestrian events “Horsing”
@Raging Bee
There’s an entire section on Wikipedia about why breakdancing is incorrect terminology for breaking. The short version of why is that “breakdance” is an umbrella term created by people who wanted to package and sell it to the mainstream and is an umbrella term that also includes non-related urban dances such as popping and locking, whereas “breaking” is a very specific style of dance that isn’t really related to the other styles of dance under the “breakdance” term.
Why have the Olympics? So those who choose to compete in their short can have a chance to compete against the best in the world. It’s not about promoting health and fitness for the greater good. It’s about elite athletes competing against each other, and I’ve no issue with that. Looking forward to the sub 9s 100m sprint!
As for Rayguns performance. Seems like the intention was to make a point that breaking isn’t a ‘sport’ as there is so much of it that’s open to regional and artistic interpretation and therefore subjective, which makes it impossible to truly judge at an international level.
Breaking is not that much to my taste, and I’ve only seen some, but it looks a bit as if Gunn’s scholarly opinions and her performance as well remind me a bit of atonal music. There’s a genre that is certainly skilled, intentional, soundly based on theory, and even, in the right context interesting and worth listening to. But it’s rarely entertaining, and rarely fun. You won’t leave an atonal concert humming the tunes.
I can understand in a way what Gunn is about, but I can also understand why, in a “sport” whose criteria are those of popular culture and a certain, if poorly defined, artistic unity, with “dance” an element even if it is cut from the name, Gunn’s performance, more declarative than entertaining, did not do well.
@Rob,
I think an explanation of broadcast sports needs to account for why people watch it, not just why athletes compete. Athletes can compete without being broadcast, and in fact it’s much easier to do so.
@M Currie,
I don’t agree with that assessment at all. Comparing to atonal music suggests a high skill performance using a style that lacks popular appeal. My impression was that Raygun’s performance was the opposite. It was lacking in skill (that is, she’s clearly very skilled, just not compared to the other Olympic breakers), but used a style with popular (and memeable) appeal.
Siggy, you’re most likely right, as my knowledge of break dancing skill is very limited indeed. It just appeared to me that what she was doing was done carefully, and she seemed to have some theoretical reason for doing it, but that it did not add up to a pleasing performance. But if someone with better knowledge of the art asserts that the apparent lack of conventional skill or artistry was unintentional, then I’m quite willing to concede and demote her to second rate academic or whatever.
@M Currie,
I’m not qualified to judge breaking, but my view is informed by what judges said in my research. Raygun received perfect losing scores. The head judge said she was showing the originality that breaking is about. However her level wasn’t as high as other competitors.
You won’t leave an atonal concert humming the tunes.
And it would sound, and look, VERY creepy if a significant number of concertgoers did. That would be an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” level of creepy.
The short version of why is that “breakdance” is an umbrella term created by people who wanted to package and sell it to the mainstream…
Granted…but isn’t that kind of what the Olympics folks are doing with it?
I would use the term “breakdance” if talking about it casually with someone who was unfamiliar with the subject. But like, I read an academic paper about it, that’s a level of depth where it’s appropriate to use proper terminology. Same goes if you were organizing a breaking tournament. It’s called what it’s called, and breakers deserve at least that amount of self-determination.
If you are a Professor of cultural studies, and you can afford to live in Sydney, then just maybe you could have realised that you are not the right person to represent the Breaking scene at the Olympics.
@rorschach
There are surely other athletes in The Olympics who perform relatively poorly due to low participation in their home countries, but do you give them even a thought? Did you even think about the Australian bboy, who probably also wasn’t great, given the circumstances? No, you don’t see them, don’t know them and don’t care.
We only know about Raygun because her performance produced some level of joy, helping it spread around the internet. For that she is punished. I condemn the hateful attention that Raygun has been getting.