Australian breaker Raygun becomes an instant viral hit at 2024 Paris Olympics

restingboredface@sh.itjust.works to News@lemmy.world – 108 points – Australian breaker Raygun becomes an instant viral hit at 2024 Paris Olympics
mashable.com

If you haven't watched the olympic break dancing competition, do yourself a favor and check it out. The woman competing for Australia might be the best thing I've seen so far.

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I think a lot of people also learned breakdancing was part of the Olympics.

I think this was the first year.

My personal hot take: anything judged shouldn't be part of the olympics. Keep it to objective competitions. For example, running. It's all scored by time. Easy.

Running has judges. Just the other day in the women's 1500m (I think) a woman was initially disqualified for pushing someone. She appealed and the decision was reversed. It's all about interpretation and subjectivity.

I can't think of any sport that doesn't have a judge or referee that has to subjectively interpret athlete's actions and the sport's rules.

Yeah, of course there's refereeing, but it's still judging objective criteria like whether a ball crossed a line, not whether someone did a fancier move.

I just gave an example of running where it was about pushing, not if someone crossed a line. They even changed their decision after an appeal when other people looked at the same situation again.

And sports like football or hockey... Have you ever watched those sports? There are subjective calls all the time. It's objective criteria, but a human still has to interpret things like handball, which depends on if your arm is in an "unnatural position" or not. Those are largely subjective decisions and there is controversy around them all the time.

With breakdancing they are of course also judging specific criteria:

The winner is determined by a panel of judges, who score each performance based on five criteria each worth a fifth of the point maximum

It's really not that different.

"Was" being the operative word.

It was fantastic and I look forward to it next year!

Fun fact: Ballroom dancing used to be an Olympic event.

I mean, if i got the opportunity to compete in the Olympics in a sport i sucked at, I'd probably take it too

It sounds like she's actually pretty good, just not her best day.

I don’t think it’s a bad day situation, that would be if she made mistakes. The moves were clearly deliberate.

I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative because how many chances do you get in a lifetime to do that on an international stage?

I was always the underdog and wanted to make my mark in a different way.

And y’know what, if it doesn’t negatively impact her career from here, power to her. It was memorable and entertaining, even if it was at her own expense. As long as her opponents didn’t feel disrespected (I don’t know enough about the breaking culture to say), I think it was worthwhile. Wouldn’t most of us say we benefitted from watching it?

I was able to find a longer clip of her via BBC iPlayer, but the IOC are copyright striking any videos outside of their official paid channels. How can it go viral when the IOC are so antiviral?!

surely there's more to it than the tiny clips within twitter posts linked in the article. you can't write an article about someone dancing, explain it poorly, and show someone else's second and a half recording of just one part of it, but only after the posts comparing it to some random ass tv show. but I guess that's what journalism is now.