Raygun

A mess of WDSF's own making and that it has to own: Raygun is No. 1 in its World Ranking

A mess of WDSF's own making and that it has to own: Raygun is No. 1 in its World Ranking

Breaking is a real sport. The world’s best do street gymnastics to a hip-hop beat. To reiterate: it is a real sport, at its best extraordinary demanding and thrilling. It is that rare experience that locks the audience in. At world-class breaking, no one, repeat no one, idly scrolls their cellphone. The crowd, young, urban, is part of the scene. And it is a scene. A scene you want to be part of. Especially if you are a teen or 20-something, the Olympic target audience.

Breaking was in for Paris 2024. It’s out for LA28. It’s unclear whether it might come back for Brisbane in 2032 and beyond.

A key challenge in breaking’s Olympic future – in or out – is the World DanceSport Federation, the international federation that oversaw breaking to and through Paris 

Perhaps nothing underscores that challenge than the WDSF World Ranking, readily available online for both men and women, or in the jargon, bboys and bgirls:

-       Raygun, the Australian breaker Rachael Gunn, is women’s No. 1.

Here we go: back to LA, the one place a Summer Olympics should always be in the United States

Here we go: back to LA, the one place a Summer Olympics should always be in the United States

News alert: the Games famously were in LA in 1932 and 1984 and will be back in 2028. If you think Paris was the best ever, and it’s right up there with London, with the proviso that all Games have backstage glitches, and on TV you lived none of that, none of the Olympic Village food drama, the COVID cases or, anywhere, the signage that would send you on trips to nowhere — LA formally now has next.

To be clear, the bar is set high, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach calling these Games, which came Sunday to a close, a “love story.”