We must have the right to ridicule ‘Raygun’

Another Olympics is now over. As the five-ring circus moves on for another four creaking years, winding from the City of Light to the City of Angels, each of us will be tucking away our mental souvenirs from the past few weeks. Normally we would probably treasure most those moments that capture the spirit of this living testament to that most ancient of disciplines – the pursuit of physical excellence.

For me and – judging from the predominant focus of the media – for most of us, Paris 2024 was very different. Few of the most memorable moments had anything to do with sporting prowess. First, there was that dispiriting, degrading tableaux of luridly dressed morbid obesity during the opening ceremony, which may or may not have been intended as a spiteful mockery of the most-famous fresco in Christendom. Second was the two biological males (the phenotype formerly known as ‘men’) receiving gold medals for punching women in the face. Third was the woman in her mid-thirties having some sort of seizure in a tracksuit, and somehow managing to denigrate both the Olympics itself and a ‘sport’ whose inclusion in the Olympics had already managed to denigrate the games.

The closing ceremony, a close fourth, was equally dismal, choosing to focus on France’s least-cherished cultural gift to the postwar world – its mystifyingly poor wedding-band reimagining of le rock’n’roll. In a year in which we lost the great Françoise Hardy, a tribute to some of the musical genres in which France remains unsurpassed – chanson and yé-yé, perhaps even a little Sacha Distel – might have been better, rather than anonymous singers prancing around like they were in a provincial tour of a local école musicale. But I digress.

Enough copy has been spilled already on the opening ceremony, and whether or not it was intended as ‘pastiche’ (French and close homonym for ‘pisstake’) of one of the most famous paintings in the world, or if it was instead a scene, not of France’s history as a Catholic nation, but of Dionysian debauchery. Still, the tribute to Carry on, Don’t Lose Your Head was at least gratefully registered on this side of la Manche.

The row about whether Imane Khelif’s inclusion in the women’s boxing category was legit is still very much alive. The welterweight’s trainer has admitted the Algerian has a ‘problem with chromosomes’ – a phrase that makes the saga sound like a slightly dated Kingsley Amis novel about someone negotiating the rapids of adolescence during the sexual revolution, rather than someone learning they’ve benefited from a fully t-loaded physique and choosing to continue with a career in physically dominating women who haven’t.

Even if it is established beyond reasonable dispute that Khelif has XY chromosomes (I am, you will note, refusing to either concede or provoke with a gendered pronoun), don’t expect to see any meaningful contrition or retractions from vast news platforms such as NBC, which dismissed female boxers’ concerns for their safety out of hand. The media have developed a body swerve when confronted with the onrushing truth that would have made David Duckham jealous.

Really, after all that, the dog’s dinner of a breakdancing farrago from Australia’s Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn actually came as a welcome relief. Footage of her writhing around on the floor, doing reverse roly-polies and struggling to pull off any of the usual breakdancing moves instantly went viral. Her performance was a recognisable species of farce, a return to former glories of absurdity such as Eddie the Eagle, Eric the Eel and the Cool Runnings Jamaican bobsleigh team that won hearts and minds, if not medals, in the 1988 Winter Olympics.

Sadly, I cannot claim to be able to place Gunn’s fiasco in the full context of the history of the ‘sport’. I didn’t even know that ‘breaking’ had been entered as an event this year until clips from Gunn’s performance began circulating on X, with comments like ‘My 18-month-old whenever I try to change her diaper’, or ‘My five-year-old niece after she says, “Watch this!”’, or ‘Napoleon Vegemite’. (I should make it clear that comparisons with Napoleon Dynamite’s thoroughly uplifting disco dance at the end of that great movie are far too flattering to Gunn.)

Gunn has apparently been determinedly chiselling away at breakdancing since at least 2008. What progress she has failed to make in practice has been more than made up for in theory, with an actual PhD in the sexual politics of the thing. She has published academic papers, such as ‘Where the #bgirls at? Politics of (in)visibility in breaking culture’. Well, whatever else she has brought to the Aussie breakdancing table, she has certainly heaped a big steaming pile of visibility on our plates.

After the understandable public ridicule came the stern rebuke from the sporting authorities. Defences of Gunn’s risible performance – which earned her literally no points, none, nil, or whatever more colourful Australian euphemisms you might wish to deploy for that tally – have been predictably mirthless. ‘Trolls and keyboard warriors’ are to blame for the negative reaction, according to Australia’s Olympic chef de mission Anna Meares, rather than ordinary people expressing their entirely legitimate online disbelief with customary wit.

Meares has also tried to blame sexism for the public’s bemused response, to the furious indignation of many women who have actually experienced that tiresome drag. Of course, no one would ever dream of laughing openly at the incompetence of a deluded male competitor on the world’s biggest stage, would they? Let alone a middle-aged white one, from a well-funded first-world nation, failing miserably to grasp even the basics of a skill most closely associated with the black, urban poor. Oh no. Never.

Worse, the Raygun affair has now become, as ever, a ‘safety’ issue. The ‘breaking federation’ says it has offered Gunn ‘mental-health support’ in the ‘wake of online criticism’.

Bollocks. Gunn is a grown woman and Australia is a big grown-up country, with a fierce tradition of sporting excellence and competitive spirit – and indeed merciless sledging, too, as many British cricketers among others know to their cost. Dishing out sly digs is as much a part of Australian culture as hopping around with your hands by your chest, pretending to be a kangaroo. Perhaps even more so.

And long may it continue. That no-nonsense attitude, no doubt rooted in the character of the men who had taken a few kicks up the backside before they found themselves Down Under building the place, is perhaps one of Australia’s greatest gifts to the world. When Brisbane hosts the Olympics in 2032, the Aussies should put sledging in the opening ceremony. And if they fuck it up, I will be among the first to let them know.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.