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There is a suspicion that breaking has broken into the Olympics to appeal to a younger audience, so 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 that 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.
The Aussie B-Girl Raygun dressed as a school PE teach complete with cap while everyone else is dressed in funky breaking outfits has sent me.It looks like she’s giving her detention for inappropriate dress at school 🤣#Olympics pic.twitter.com/lWVU3myu6C
Can’t stop watching this kangaroo dance in the breaking 🦘🇦🇺#Paris2024 #Olympics #BBCOlympics pic.twitter.com/2LpWjfc5hW
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 the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature.
Should breaking (never breakdancing, keep up grandad) 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. 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).
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 of those moves come from the Chinese top seed Liu Qingyi, 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 gentleman’s brainstorming session. This misses the point that now it is 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 competitors’ name like a six-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.
An enjoyable experience in the sense that it was something new, something, albeit unintentionally, amusing, and something which the athletes were clearly enjoying – the Summer Olympics is meant to be an enjoyable occasion so it’s encouraging to see the competitors harness this spirit.
In terms of the actual event, and its place in the Games, I’ll let you read Thom’s report at the top of this page. Either way, here are your quarter-finals:
Gesturing is a big element of the sport, the judges ranking a breaker’s ‘vocabulary’ on it. I think. It just doesn’t look good at the end of a fortnight where we’ve seen several gold medals handed to boxers, judokas, wrestlers, rugby players when these MC hosts and the breakers’ teams go crazy every time they do a gesture in one another’s direction – the commentators tell us it’s a really intense battle when this happens but the bipartisan crowd really suggest otherwise.
You know it’s a struggle when expert commentators feel the need to tell you that both B Girls are “really listening to the music” as means of describing how intense a battle is, musicality is what they’re being rated on! Stefani comes out with a narrow 10-8 victory to secure passage to this evening’s quarterfinals.
We’re reaching the end of these pool stages and Italy’s Anti breaks down into tears (sorry) as she heads home. We have confirmation that the USA’s Logitx and Australia’s Raygun are heading home in group B, Anti exiting Group C alongside African champion Elmamouny of Morocco.
With each battle performed to a variety of different DJ sets, the music definitely presents a chance of engagement, and an opportunity to be culturally contemporary. Most of the battles have been to non-descript hip-hop, this most recent battle between Ying Zi and Ami featured an irritating remix of Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise. It feels as though they’re missing a chance to fulfil the IOC’s wishes.
Actual Snoop Dogg is in the crowd and he’s yet to feature – the gymnastics managed that in the women’s floor exercise final when Jordan Chiles performed to Drop it like its Hot. It’s best I avoid drawing any further comparisons between the two sports there.
36-year-old Raygun finishes her last battle against world champion Nicka, and a third 18-0 loss means she goes home without a single point. I will stick my neck out and say the optics of a 36-year-old getting clean swept aren’t great for the IOC, who included this event in an attempt to increase youth outreach.
Simon Briggs actually foreshadowed how baffling this would be when he said youths are likely playing Call of Duty instead of watching the Olympics, the irony being that the ray gun is of course a piece of weaponry in that game.
Ooooo, aggressive from Vanessa there, 671 won’t like that! She gestures right in her face – no misbehaviour deductions as far as I can tell but I could be wrong as the judgement element of this is needlessly obscure. 671 is ramped up, she gestures to the crowd, really intense battle here!
671 takes it 14-4, memorable battle! I’m trying my best, but every now and then a dancer does a flip which tends to illicit the best reactions from the crowd – boy do I have a few sports for them!
The scoring works as follows: There are nine judges that score a round to whoever they think won measured against the five frustratingly abstract scoring metrics. There are a minimum of two rounds, and in the event of a 9-9 draw in a battle – something that has yet to happen – we go to a decisive third.
We’ve just had what seems to be the first upset, 12th seed Kate of Ukraine beating fourth seed Ayumi of Japan to take the group lead. I’m afraid I honestly have no idea what separated the two.
In the battle following, Stefani beats French B-Girl Carlota 12-6 to take a provisional second place in her group – the top two in each group go through.
A reminder that each throwdown is rated on five metrics: technique, vocabulary, execution, musicality and originality.
Thom has already commented on the originality, but the rest of the metrics aren’t exactly self-explanatory. Execution probably should be, but libs are flailing about left right and centre and measured against comparable sports like gymnastics it’s much harder for the naked eye to be able to tell what is clean and what isn’t.
Technique in particular is an aspect that they seem to be short on compared to similar sports. Like gymnastics, or diving, many of the ground work here is beyond comprehension, but none of it seems to have a name, or known difficulty ratings. It’s relatively difficult to get a gauge of who is doing better than the other, and therefore emotionally invest in a judging decision or scoring.
I could live all my life and never come up with anything as funny as Raygun, the 36-year-old Australian Olympic breakdancer pic.twitter.com/1uPYBxIlh8
Absolute clinic (according to the judges) from home favourite Syssy against Australia’s raygun, who, unlike many of her fellow competitors, is dressed in her country’s kit.
It does make her stick out a bit though, the others look more the part whereas Raygun looks as though she’s trying to secure her place at the 2028 games by dressing in Australia’s t20 cricket kit.
You don’t need me to tell you that Logistx vs Nicka is one of the ties of the round.
The Lithuanian European champ vs the American fan of sorting stuff out. I’d give that first bout to Logistx, especially for the sassy faux faceslap in the middle, but the judges award it narrowly to Nicka, more of a technician, really nailing those freezes.
It’s all hugely impressive stuff, but not quite an hour in I am beginning to feel a bit like “seen one breaking routine, seen them all.” There’s 4.5 more hours of this today.
There are official Olympic scoreboards that currently say China’s ‘671’ is top of the Olympic scoreboard…
I’m trying my hardest not to be skeptical, as a rugby and cricket fan the importance of keeping youth sporting participation high is not lost, so if the Place de la Concorde was packed with youngsters like, despite its abundant shortcomings, the Hundred is, I’d be more tolerant. However, the somewhat abrasive hosts, judges, and crowd don’t seem to be especially young.
The other problem is that until the ground work starts, the breakers are really not doing what I guess many would consider ‘Olympic level sport’, instead something more akin to your extroverted mate after a few pints. It’s where other previously criticised modern Olympic sports have done better to secure their future, like skateboarding – there is absolutely no element to that sport where a non-participator might think they can do it to this level. The opening parts of each throwdown in this begs to differ.
If my untrained eye were to try and explain this to you, each breaker has 60 seconds to perform a throwdown. Given the music is a surprise to them, they spend the first section of their routine on their feet, dancing somewhat aggressively in a manner that reminds me of a fight scene in the dance musical Westside story, or when footballers are threatening to fight someone but don’t actually want to fight them.
They then ‘throwdown’ into their floor work which is the more eye-catching and impressive part of the display – for rugby fans think Scott ‘Razor’ Robertson after he wins a super rugby title, for the rest of you think Max Whitlock almost falling off his pommel horse. Each time they do this the two hosts jeopardise any chance of the breaker scoring musicality points by screaming down the mic and drowning out the beat…
The next battle is definitely something we can all get behind. It features Ukraine’s Stefani – Anna Ponomarenko – who has overcome some serious adversity to compete at the Olympics. Her rigorous training as a dancer saw her temporarily paralysed from the neck down, and since fully recovering she has reverted on a plan to represent Team GB having moved to London in pursuit of funding, opting instead to fly Ukraine’s flag after Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Since then, she’s also given birth, in fact qualifying for the Olympics whilst four months pregnant whilst her hometown of Kharkiv, which is a Russian-Ukraine border city, has been decimated. Truly inspirational, but she loses this round by one vote to Japan’s Ayumi.
We’re into our fourth battle of the the pool stage, starting with group B and now group C – group A performing last for reasons I don’t understand, it seems this has all ruffled enough feathers.
USA’s Logistx tops group B, whilst China’s Ying Zi tops group C after each breaker have had their first battles.
For further clarification on the format, and what you need to know about breaking, we do have an explainer here. It contains a video of the Olympic qualifiers so you can get a gauge of how these battles and throwdowns work.
Great question. To an extent, the B-Girls don’t actually know. It’s a best of three rounds – each round called a ‘throwdown’ in which the breakers are performing to music chosen by the DJ – these aren’t rehearsed routines. There are stewards surrounding the circular stage holding signs asking crowd members to remain seated, which doesn’t seem to match the hype that host Max is trying to bestow on the event.
I have come to the breaking with an open mind but one of the hosts of the event, Max, from Portugal, is testing my patience already. He sounds like a child doing an impression of a rapper as the competitors emerge, announcing all the b-girls with artless repetitions of their name.
Thankfully he wraps it up for now and we are into the first ever breaking a pre-qualifier for the forthcoming round robin which pits the Netherlands’ India against Talash, who is representing the refugee team. She fled the Taliban in Afghanistan from her family and in the final round she rips off her hoodie to reveal a blue cape with the words “Free Afghan Women” written on.
It’s not enough to clinch her a place in the round robin though, a clean sweep for India puts her into the final 16. Delighted to see that the judges agreed with me, it looked like clear superiority from the Netherlands’ breaker. Strengthens my application to be the Telegraph’s official breaking correspondent.
And a fascinating battle for us first, France’s Syssy (each B-Girl has a pseudonym) taking on World Champion Nicka from Lithuania. Nicka takes it 11-7 – more on the scoring system once I’ve understood it later.
As with any new sport in a sporting event that is based in ancient-Greek philosophe, breaking has its critics.
None more so than squash, the sport that was omitted from this year’s games in lieu of breaking. Squash has been toiling away for dozens of years to get Olympic accreditation, and its British former number one Nick Matthew has queried the possibility of legal action against the IOC for its continual rejection.
Our reporter Simon Briggs also had a few things to say about it…
Breaking’s inclusion at Paris 2024 is part of a conscious IOC initiative to modernise, or urbanise, the Olympics, President Thomas Bach citing it as a sport that is “particularly popular among the younger generation”.
As our article on ‘how to become an Olympic sport’ explains, youth engagement gave breaking a particular advantage in breaking into (sorry) the Olympic scene, although there are several other requirements ranging from doping alignment to host-country popularity to IOC appeasement and, on that last point, financial incentive.
For breaking, modernity and host-country popularity seem to be the biggest influencing factors – Paris organisers say it’s an “urban, universal and popular sport with more than a million B-Boys and B-Girls in France” – the irony of course being that breaking is essentially being replaced for the LA 2028 games by the world’s oldest institutional sport that, until this year, had little to no American influence – cricket.
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the new kid on the Olympic block, breaking. What is breaking, I hear you ask? Do not call it breakdancing, even though that is what you most likely know it as. Its athletes, or B-Boys and B-Girls, don’t like that.
The breaking community, that has its roots in the New York hip-hop movement of the 1970s, insist breakdancing was a term coined by those outside their clique, and that the reality of their sport is that it’s an art form, with clear, tangible metrics that judges can score from.
Those five metrics are technique, vocabulary, execution, musicality and originality, each accounting for 20 per cent of a breaker’s score, which they accrue over a best of three ‘battle’ against another breaker – there are 16 competitors in each of the men and women’s, sorry B-Boys and B-Girls, events, which will begin with a pool stage in which four groups of four compete in round robins.
The B-Girls are up first today, the round robin taking place in this afternoon’s blog before the quarters, semis and final this evening and the B-Boys’ competition tomorrow, so make the most of this weekend whilst you can because it’s already been confirmed that breaking will not feature in the 2028 LA Games, organisers rejecting it alongside karate (the one-hit wonder from Tokyo), motorsport, and kickboxing.
As an early preview, keep an eye out for Lithuania’s Dominika Banevič, (nickname Nicka) who beat Japan’s Ayumi Fukushima (nickname Ayumi) to World Championship gold last year, as well as Ukraine’s Anna Ponomarenko (nickname Stefani) – more on her in a bit though. There are no British interests, unfortunately.
Now, if you hadn’t already noticed, I’m not an expert on breaking, although I could bore you with the details of breaking’s socio-economic 1970s background and some of the other components of hip-hop that breaking accompanies – rapping, DJ-ing and graffiti – but I will try to help take you through this unique, and most likely one-off experience for the round robin stage. I’ll make sure to note any misbehaviour deductions that judges can enforce for inappropriate gesturing, any controversial DJ decisions that the breakers may not have anticipated, and any moves that make my head spin, as well as explain of course, who qualifies. Stay tuned!
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