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'Raygun' retires from breaking after Paris 2024 Olympic Games backlash (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, said she would no longer compete as a breaker following her much-ridiculed Paris 2024 Olympic performance.

Gunn said it was "impossible to process" the impact of her performance.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think it's moreso the fault of the Olympics trying to create a new sport in such a small amount of time. One thats based on a subjective art that didn't have a long history of regulated competition.

The reason we didn't get the absolute best break dancers from every nation is simply because there wasn't an established organization that was already holding regulated competitions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are hundreds of breakdancing competitions every year. Her "moves" appear in none of them.

What she did was not breakdancing in any sense. From a breakdancing perspective it was absolutely horrible. From an art perspective it was also astonishingly bad. From a nepo standpoint she should have had the self awareness to politely decline rather than embarrass herself, the sport and the entire country.

There are no excuses to be made for her that are legitimate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

There are hundreds of breakdancing competitions every year. Her "moves" appear in none of them.

Right, but they aren't being conducted by a uniform body that has the ability to consistently rank the participants on a graded scale.

It would be like if you tried to get the best basketball players in America without there being an NBA. Of course there would still be thousands of basketball games, but there would be no way to organize and choose the best players from those games.

From a nepo standpoint she should have had the self awareness to politely decline rather than embarrass herself, the sport and the entire country.

I'm not arguing that there wasn't any nepotism involved. I'm just saying that that's to be expected when the Olympics just hands over the selection process over to some random dance studio, and then expects them to create a governing body in such a small amount of time.

There are no excuses to be made for her that are legitimate

I don't think anyone was trying to "excuse" her participation? Explaining how a bad thing happened doesn't mean you are attempting to validate the bad thing. Structuring an argument that way does nothing but eliminate the ability to have a nuanced opinion.