Australia B-Girl Raygun Goes Viral For Olympic Performance & It’s Probably OK To Leave Breakdancing Out Of The Olympics

Forgive me for not remembering the small snippet of whatever interview legendary Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston gave to drive home the point I’m about to make, but it’s too salient to the Summer Olympics’ debut of breakdancing (or breaking, if you like) not to bring up here.

Cranston was talking about how uncomfortable it can be to see a fellow actor’s performance, not be a massive fan of it, and having to congratulate them afterwards all the same. His go-to out lines were, “You did it!” and “Hey, you’re having fun!” Or words to that effect. As opposed to, “You sucked! That play/movie sucked!” and so on.

All I can say about breakdancing as an Olympic sport, to put it in the kindest terms, is as follows: Hey guys, you had fun. You did it! Congratulations on getting this far.

…Now please let’s never see this again. Due respect to Australian B-girl Raygun — that is, in fact, a term for female breakdancer that I fervently Googled for fear of misogynist accusations — but this ain’t quite hitting for me. Or a lot of folks who tuned in on Friday to see the breaking ladies kick off this inaugural event of the grand Olympiad.

Raygun had three head-to-head matchups in the round robin qualifying stage, and this might shock you, but she lost all three of ’em.

There are layers to why I brought up acting at the top, because to me, breakdancing is more performance art than sport, or at least that’s the box it’s traditionally confined to. There’s a certain subjectivity to most performing arts, not least of which is acting. Cranston could star in a Tony Award-winner on Broadway, and somebody in that audience could dislike his acting style or take some other issue with the story.

So like, who am I to say that Raygun is a “bad” breakdancer? I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know every move she’s trying to pull off, much less how judges are scoring this thang. Because of my respect and reverence for the arts, I’ll let strangers on Twitter laugh at this situation as opposed to doing so myself.

In fairness, despite some viewers’ assertion that Raygun, a 36-year-old professor, is competing against teens — understandable given the “B-girl” moniker — the gold medal was actually won by 25-year-old Ami Yuasa of China.

She won the gold at the 2022 World Games and the silver medal in the Asian Games a couple years back as well. Yuasa’s compatriot Q.G. Liu settled for bronze, as Lithuania’s Dominika Banevic made it all the way to the grand finale to earn silver.

Am I being a bad champion of the arts by limiting its ceiling and trying to gatekeep breakdancing from the Summer Games? Hard to say. This clip of Yuasa’s routine was pretty sick, though.

Maybe with a little more time to up the prestige and thicken the field of competition to qualify for the Olympics, breakdancing can become a staple. Or at least somewhat digestible once every four years on this extraordinary athletic stage.