Her thoughts on this are ,indeed, very very academic.
the whole breakdancing/olympics thing is weird - apparently the reason it was in there in the first place is cause some world dance federation tried for a decade to get ballroom dancing into the olympics, then decided it was too boomer and pivoted into trying to attract a gen z crowd
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I take more of a viewpoint that if sheâs done that, sheâs actively denied someone an opportunity to try win at an Olympics. Breaking will be a one and done sport at the Olympics.
âI donât like it so you canât have itâ is basically what it is.
Also turns out that to enter qualifiers and Oceania championships, B-Girls had to be registered with three different organisations and hold a passport. As many of the talented dancers come from the refugee community, this may have been beyond their means.
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Really though. I mean she obviously qualified as the Oceania rep.
I assume that the Oceania position is the one that is required by the Olympics for each area, and a bit of a token position because no one from the top 20 in the world was from Oceania. So Oceania conducts a comp and someone gets through who will be expected to be down the bottom of the field. Now âdance sports Oceaniaâ or whatever the org is, is probably some 2 bit organisation that has not really managed to get kids in the street who are actually any good particularly interested in sports dancing, so the field was pretty weak, and she got the win. Ok. At that point she has the right to turn up and do what she wants. She wasnât taking the position of anyone who was any chance to âwinâ.
I rewatched the womens breaking yesterday. The Chinese was doing a great routine with heaps of spins and headstands and the like, and the opposition was making signs that this was âpre plannedâ and the commentators were calling out how the Chinese breaker tended to script her performances, and that is looked down on in breaking.
So the whole premise of breaking is you turn up, you get the vibe of the day and you do what you feel like. Large amounts of it involves writhing around on the ground.
So basically she was the Bhutanian marathoner or (insert other random not good enough competitor who is there to fill numbers) and sheâs decided to have a bit of fun with it, and at the same time mock âDance Sportsâ etc for trying to create a competition out of something that we all donât think is a competition.
I mean, who cares. The whole thing has been blown so far out of proportion. In every sport at the Olympics there are people making up the numbers. In most cases we applaud them for having a crack. But Australians arenât normally those, and even worse academics, and in a sport that we think is stupid anywayâŚ
Tbh her 5 minutes of fame has lasted far longer than it needed to. Have a laugh. Have a laugh at breaking in general. (Except at Ami, she was awesome) And then move on.
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HEGEMONIC SETTLER-COLONIAL STRUCTURES THAT RELY UPON RADICALIZED AND GENDERED HIERARCHIES.
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That is not surprising at all.
Itâs interesting that all of the interviews talk about breaking being about bringing something different, and generally theyâre supportive of Raygun, who seems to actually be a member of the community at least amongst those interviewed.
The toxic stuff seems to come from the internet pile on and people who wouldnât have even known what breaking was except for that performance.
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I mean she had to get a grant right. You have to play to the academic audience.
But do you think there arenât hegemonic settler-coloni structures that rely on racialised and gendered hierarchies? I mean the AFL is built in them
Itâs just hilarious to me that weâre in a world where we are analysing farking break dancing within an inch of itâs life and from such a perspective and getting paid to spew out word salads like this about it 
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Around this same time, there was an indigenous arts festival in the top end. A hip hop artist won a competition. Which leads me to think that hip hop and break dancing may be a popular competitive sport in indigenous communities.
But I donât suppose Dance Sport had tapped into the talent there to find an internationally competitive break dancer who had built on indigenous dance skills.
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The incentives for academics is to spew out as many published papers and have them cited as many times as possible, so itâs not really a surprise.
And I think itâs fair to analyse social and cultural scenes to try and understand humans.
But I donât think a social and cultural scene should be forced into the Olympic program. Itâs obviously a fantastic athletic skill and takes a long time to learn some of the moves, but itâs so immature as a sport (as far as I can tell the first world champs were in the late 2010s), and so much more a culture than a competitive sport that it just didnât make sense to be trying to force it into the Olympic program
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Iâm imagining Dance Sports Australian is run by a group of 70yo ex ballroom dancersâŚ
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I reckon Darts at the Olympics would go absolutely off
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Iâm just mad that I didnât get into the team. She literally stole half my moves.
Thanks for posting, thatâs the type of article I was hoping would come out - the sceneâs angles on how it affects the actual scene, why we were not represented well, and what it overshadows by focusing so much on Raygun.
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By all accounts it most definitely is.
The nature of the scoring system created for it also allowed for âcompetitorsâ to be slaughtered in front of an Olympic audience. Itâs quite easy for the judging panel to vote unanimously in favour of one breaker, and we canât see if their individual decisions were a close thing, and how they actually rated the breakers side by side.
Skateboarding comes from a similar cultural background, but is more easily translatable to a casual audience looking for scores to help them understand what theyâve just seen.
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My eyes tell me that the scoring system had nothing to do with RayGun being slaughtered.
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Red Bull sponsors international championships, some annually.
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Hockey is a lot less combative than footy. As someone who only played social league, and from footy background, we were a bit unorthodox. lacked some dribbling skills, but had speed and social hockey allows more time to push and set up plays etc, I wasnât afraid to throw the stick in, most stick clashes are stick on stick and good refs tell players to settle down if they donât quite know the rules. The big one is no high balls. i.e donât hit ball above knee or hip height.
Proper hockey would be worried about copping a ball to the face the way they fling it about.
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