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There is a suspicion that breaking has broken into the Olympics to appeal to a younger audience, so there’s some surprise that its opening day was dominated by a 36-year-old Australian.
The b-girl Rachael Gunn – aka Raygun – did not come away with one of the first medals in the sport, in fact she lost each of her three round-robin bouts by two rounds to zero with her opponents scoring clean sweeps of 18-0 from the judges. But there can be no doubt she was breaking’s breakout star.
Even to the uninitiated, the performances of Raygun looked a level beneath that of her competitors. Social media users have reacted with the level of empathy you would expect: none. Marks for effort were through the roof, for execution perhaps less so.
Raygun competes during the Breaking B-Girls round-robin Group B battle. Photo / Getty Images
When not appearing in Paris, Gunn is a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, where she researched “the cultural politics of breaking” while teaching students in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature.
Should breaking (never “breakdancing”, keep up Granddad) be at the Olympics at all? Even the breaking community does not seem entirely convinced. Theirs is a counter-cultural artform born on the streets of the Bronx, so there is ambivalence from some elders about the embrace of the establishment in the form of the IOC.
“It changes everything,” said veteran b-boy Alien Ness to the New York Times. “Now it’s an Olympic gold medal. Now it’s a box of Wheaties. Now it’s your own Nike shoe. It’s everything that comes with that.”
“Is it a sport?” asks the explainer on the official Paris 2024 website. “Yes, you bet,” it helpfully answers, but it is questionable whether the sport-ification of a self-expressive dance is either good or necessary. Nevertheless, it was the turn of the b-girls on Friday and initially the novelty went a long way. The music is bracingly loud, the judges are introduced like boxers and two of the nine have bucket hats pulled down so far over their eyes they must surely be guessing with their marks.
Each competitor faces off in two “throwdowns” of 60 seconds each with the judges choosing a winner based on musicality, vocabulary (variety of moves), originality, technique and execution. It is truly spontaneous, with even the music unknown in advance, so an antidote to the rehearsed direction of travel in other sports. There’s no dress code either, which provides some entertaining combinations. Bout two pitted our new heroine Raygun (backstroke swimmer taking excited first walk around Olympic village in official team tracksuit and baseball cap) against America’s Logistx (1998 Gap advert).
Syssy, of France, looks on as Raygun performs. Photo / Getty Images
So does it work? Will it ultimately go down as an Olympic curio, like the firefighting competition from the 1900 games? (A team from Leyton won a silver for Great Britain in the volunteer category. They all count). Occasionally you witness something absurdly athletic. Many come from the Chinese top seed Liu Qingy, aka b-girl 671. It is impossible to dismiss her strength, her defiance of gravity, her deliberate embrace of the sort of twisties gymnasts spend their careers worrying about.
The roots in other dance forms are clear, a bit of salsa here, a touch of cossack there, but there are also moves cribbed from kung fu films. Practitioners like to stress that each performance is a statement of individuality, which occasionally comes through, like in the cheeky faux slap from French teenager Syssy.
Yet there is a lingering feeling that breaking is a poor fit for the Olympics and vice versa. If it has been waved through to appeal to children, it is an unusual move to appeal specifically to the children of 1983. Breaking, skateboarding and BMXs were all the rage then and their Olympic status now feels like the result of an older gentlemen’s brainstorming session. This misses the point that now it’s all eSports, TikTok and disposable vapes.
If BMX-ing and skateboarding have provided moments of unforced fun, breaking seems afraid to let its plus points speak for themselves. As such we are subjected to a constant soundtrack of inane non-commentary from two hype men. These are a traditional feature of any “jam” but surely there was a better candidate available than Max from Portugal, whose monotonous shouting and propensity to talk over his co-host is utterly grating.
He is a hollering dolt saying “yo” and chanting each competitor’s name like a 6-year-old doing an insulting impression of rapping, a total distraction from the art and mastery of the people who should be the centre of attention.
“If you love breaking, you will love beautiful musics,” he yells at one point. “So make some noise to the DJs!” I’d take less noise, if anything. Certainly some insight would be helpful, all you get from Max is a headache.
Clearly there are some learned heads in this crowd but the majority would surely benefit from a bit of context about what they are watching. By the end of the round robin there is a creeping sense that once you’ve seen 24 breaking battles, you’ve seen them all. The cheers get quieter, the hosts and music do not.
There are two sudden bursts of rain, each lasting about three minutes. People stream for the exits and not all of them return.
Hear it as it happens with live commentary of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 on GOLD SPORT & iHeartRadio, plus comprehensive coverage on Newstalk ZB.
