I saw someone describe her performance as olympic in spirit, but I think what’s more significant is the Australian spirit shown.
She’s basically dressed as a PE teacher. Her movements were competent and decently timed, but she was clearly out of her league compared to the other competitors. She comes from a country with a very small breakdancing culture and is 36 years old, was the best of the women’s contestants that showed up, and has a PhD in breaking.
Her performance was actually competent, mixed in with silly movements like the kangaroo and various slides. She showed more dynamic movement than any of her fellow competitors and less repetition. A novelty sport in its first year should be about doing your best and having fun trying, and this is something that Australians are supposed to pride ourselves on.
Australia has ‘having a fair go’ as one of our main national values. Our culture embraces having a fun joke, half the things we tell foreigners about our country are made up, and the ones that aren’t are still often silly enough that you guys can’t actually tell. We make jokes at our own expense, and we take pride in not being too full of ourselves.
Raygun’s performance showed the best available competitor doing her best, having a good time, being creative, and having the spirit too have a laugh at her own expense. I think we should be laughing with her, and I think Australians should be proud that she was willing to dress like a primary school student and have a laugh while still giving a fair crack.
It’s not as simply as trying out. The NOCs for new and strange events can often be semi-corrupt and nepotistic or use bizarre and simply wrong criteria. In this case, she was shunted forward through her connections. She didn’t win some national contest for this. There’s a reason it’s an ad hoc event like this and not an embarrassment with some long established event. NOCs frankly shouldn’t be sending anyone who got there in such a strange, untried manner and who frankly isn’t a serious contestant.
If my mate Steve were connected by an NOC branch with weird and insane criteria for selection and got rung up out of the blue to go and compete when he didn’t deserve it, maybe he’d go too. I’d hope not.
From all accounts I’ve seen the qualifiers were poorly run and only in one location in Sydney. I think the NOCs or the IOC did a shit job, but I don’t think it was foul play nor do I think she should be responsible for stepping aside just because she knows there are better dancers.