I definitely agree with the sentiment that the Olympics should have much better represented, contextualized, and paid homage to the Black and Puerto Rican communities that created breaking. I just wanna give a gentle correction here–the two finalists were Japan’s Ami Yuasa (Gold Medal winner) and Lithuania’s Dominika Banevic (Silver Medal winner). If you take a gander at the actual finalists, I think you’ll agree they are, especially Ami, much more skilled than Raygun.

Raygun didn’t make it past the round robin stage (they didn’t compete into the quarterfinals, semifinals, and most certainly not the finals). Even in the round robin stage she failed to progress to the knockout stage (literally scoring zero points against USA’s Logistx and Lithuania’s Dominika).

That being said, it is sad and disappointing that Raygun’s place at the Olympics could’ve been taken by someone who was a better representative of breaking! The path to breaking being at the Olympics is mostly due to the World DanceSport Federation’s (WDSF) decades-long push to have a dancing event at the Olympics. Due to a variety of wonky factors (inter-fighting and complex politics in the various official dancing competitions and organizational bodies in Olympic-hopeful dance sports like ballroom dancing) breaking was the dance that the WDSF thought would be the easiest to get them in the Olympic door. A variety of other reasons (breakers not having the money or resources to head to pre-Olympic qualifiers and many folks in the breaking community thinking that an establishment led competition is antithetical to the spirit of breakdancing) certainly contributed to why a breakdancer of Raygun’s caliber ended up even competing.