It Seems Weirdly Inevitable That the Enduring Legacy of Breakdancing in the Olympics Will Be a Goofy White Woman Dancing Badly
When I was eight years old, the Olympics were a big deal because of the Cold War. As a child, I was force-fed propaganda about the Soviet Union being an evil empire full of super-soldiers intent on our destruction.
The Russians were the bad guys, and we were the good guys. Every four years, the bad guys and the good guys went to war in athletics, with the whole world watching.
I will consequently always associate the Olympics with a Cold War that pitted history’s greatest heroes, the United States, against history’s greatest monsters, the former Soviet Union.
I have particularly vivid memories of 1988 when McDonald's had a promotion where if the United States won a gold, silver, or bronze medal in a particular event, you got a free Big Mac, French fry, or soft drink.
No purchase was required, so my sister and I would ask for a free card every afternoon and then redeem the card we’d just gotten.
The other happy childhood memory involved gratuitous breakdancing sequences in silly movies. When I was eight years old breakdancing was also a big deal.
It exploded out of the streets and went mainstream in a big way with crossover smashes like Breakin. Today, Breakin is best known for inspiring a sequel with the iconic subtitle Electric Boogaloo, but that was a bona fide pop culture phenomenon at the time of its release. It was the seventeenth top-grossing of the year.
That’s particularly impressive, considering it starred Boogaloo Shrimp and Lucinda Dickey and cost just over a million dollars to make.
I stopped giving a fuck about the Olympics a long time ago. It’s something that I associate with my childhood and my past instead of my adulthood and present. But I still get excited when I watch a movie from the 1980s, and everything stops completely for three magnificent minutes so that the heroes can watch talented, hungry young kids show off incredible breakdancing moves that have nothing to do with the plot or the rest of the film.
So when I heard that breakdancing was being made an Olympic sport, I got excited. For the first time in decades, something about the Olympics has interested me.
Bear in mind, I didn’t set out to watch the breakdancing competition at the Olympics. I haven’t watched the Olympics on television since I was a kid. But I was excited about the greatest breakdancers in the world competing in the biggest and most prestigious athletic competition in the world.
I looked forward to seeing YouTube clips of amazing, gravity-defying performances from a rainbow coalition of passionate dancers overjoyed to find themselves in the biggest spotlight in the world.
So what, ultimately, is the legacy of the first and perhaps only breakdancing competition in Olympic history? People will remember it almost exclusively as the place where a thirty-six year old white professor calling herself Raygun won the hearts and minds of the public through a hypnotically misguided and ill-conceived performance.
It was the kind of performance that made even the aggressively unathletic think, “I bet if I practiced for a couple of weeks I could do that.”
As far as the media and the public were concerned, Raygun might as well have been the only competitor. God knows nobody talked about good breakdancing in the Olympics. People weren’t talking loftily about breakdancing as an important art form finally getting its due; they were talking about the silly Australian woman who at one point hopped like a kangaroo in a misguided display of Australian pride.
Raygun might infamously have received zero points for her very Caucasian style of dance, but she won worldwide fame and attention. She’ll never have to pay for a beer in a bar again. She can go on Cameo and charge 300 dollars a video.
The silly white lady who made breakdancing seem like a goof got all of the attention while gifted POC were ignored.
That seems weirdly inevitable. That’s how the world tends to work. It’s Vanilla Ice all over again.
Despite taking place in Los Angeles, the setting for Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, breakdancing will not be part of the 2028 Olympics.
That’s a bummer but thankfully we’ll all have our wonderful memories of that Australian academic dancing so badly that it went viral and captured the world’s attention.
Nathan has expensive dental implants that have made his life much better. Unfortunately, his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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