Breaking Had One Shot at the Olympics. What Happened?

Raygun gets all the blame, but LA28 had already made its picks before the Paris Games even started.

For one very strange weekend in Paris, Olympic viewers became experts on breaking.

We learned about B-Boys and B-Girls, and we argued about judging. We watched people spin on their heads at Place de la Concorde, and Snoop Dogg was there, because Snoop Dogg was apparently required to attend everything at the 2024 Olympics.

Then there was Raygun.

Australian breaker Rachael Gunn became one of the most talked-about athletes of the Games, just not the way anyone in breaking had hoped. Her routine inspired memes, late-night sketches, and a lot of people asking the same question:

Wait, breaking is an Olympic sport?

It was. For exactly one Summer Olympics. It won’t be in Los Angeles in 2028.

But they didn’t drop breaking because Paris went badly. The decision was made before the Paris Games even started.

Why Was Breaking in the Olympics in the First Place?

The Olympics got more flexible. Host organizers can now propose extra sports for their edition of the Games so that each city can shape part of the program around its culture and audience.

Paris used that rule. Organizers wanted a more urban, more artistic Games, and the IOC liked that breaking could connect with younger fans. Skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing had come in through the same door at Tokyo 2020, and Paris brought all three back. The IOC has spent years trying to reach people who aren’t obsessing over fencing results and dressage scores, and breaking could be staged in the middle of a city.

I wrote about it in 2019, a month after the IOC gave Paris a provisional yes on breaking, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing. It wasn’t official until December 2020, and my post had a lot of exclamation points: Breaking As An Olympic Sport?! Coming to Paris in 2024!

Honestly, I get the logic. If the Olympics can include artistic swimming, trampoline, and horses dancing sideways, two people battling to music isn’t a stretch.

The Experiment Was Bigger Than One Weekend

Paris didn’t just drop breaking on the schedule and hope. An international qualification system was in place, and breaking was part of the IOC’s new Olympic Qualifier Series with BMX freestyle, skateboarding, and sport climbing. The events in Shanghai and Budapest were festival-style, pairing competition with culture.

The Olympic competition had some of the best breakers in the world. Japan’s Ami Yuasa won the women’s gold, and Canada’s Philip “Phil Wizard” Kim won the men’s. The sessions sold out, which is what Paris wanted.

Ask a casual viewer what they remember about breaking in Paris, though, and those names probably won’t come up first. You know who will.

We Have to Talk About Raygun

There’s no getting around it. Rachael “Raygun” Gunn took over the conversation about Olympic breaking.

She lost all three of her round-robin battles, and clips of her more unconventional moves spread online almost immediately. Then people started asking how she’d qualified, and conspiracy theories followed. She qualified by winning the Oceania championships, a direct qualifier. Gunn says the nine judges were all from overseas.

None of that stopped the ridicule. Three months later, she said the backlash had been so upsetting that she was retiring from competition.

You can think her performance was bizarre. Plenty of people did. You can laugh at a move without pretending you’ve never laughed at anything online. But one athlete became shorthand for an entire discipline, and that’s the part I find uncomfortable. Nobody judges Olympic basketball by its worst player.

Breaking had incredible athletes with real strategy and improvisation, but most missed it because one routine became a meme. That’s not the legacy anyone wanted.

But Raygun Did Not Get Breaking Kicked Out

This is the biggest misconception. Los Angeles had already chosen the extra sports it wanted for 2028.

In October 2023, the IOC approved LA28’s proposal to add baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse, and squash. Breaking wasn’t on the list. The Olympic breaking competition took place in August 2024, so breaking’s absence from LA28 was settled about ten months before Raygun ever stepped onto the floor.

No emergency IOC meeting happened after the memes started. Nobody watched her and yelled, “Cancel breaking!” Los Angeles just made different choices, and they make sense for the host. Baseball and softball have obvious American appeal. Flag football fits an Olympics in the United States. Lacrosse has deep North American roots, cricket brings a huge international audience, and squash finally got in after several failed attempts.

LA28 proposed those five as a package for its own edition of the Games, and there are only so many spots. Breaking wasn’t necessarily rejected. It just wasn’t invited back.

That’s the Weird Thing About the New Olympics

This is where the confusion comes from. We grew up thinking a sport was either Olympic or it wasn’t.

Swimming? Olympic.

Track and field? Olympic.

Competitive staring contest? Not Olympic. Yet.

Now a sport can show up for one host city and disappear at the next, depending on what the organizers propose and the IOC approves. That makes the Games more flexible. It also makes things strange for the athletes. You spend years working toward the biggest sporting event on Earth, finally get your discipline onto the program, and there may not be another one four years later. The breakers in Paris had no guaranteed Los Angeles sequel, which is a very different relationship with the Olympics than swimmers or gymnasts have.

So Was Breaking a Failure?

I don’t think that’s fair.

Did Olympic breaking have problems? Yes. The judging was hard for casual viewers to follow, the broadcast didn’t always explain what the judges wanted, and the most famous performance of the whole event was famous because millions of people thought it looked ridiculous.

But it also did what Paris wanted. It put a young, highly visual, international subculture in front of sold-out crowds in the middle of a city. The bigger issue may be that breaking joined an Olympic system where one successful run doesn’t guarantee another invitation.

And It Might Come Back

Breaking isn’t necessarily finished. In August 2026, the World DanceSport Federation formally submitted a bid to put breaking on the Brisbane 2032 program. It had been building support in Australia, including a World Breaking DanceSport Festival in Brisbane in January 2026.

Whether the bid works is another question. IOC President Kirsty Coventry has said Brisbane won’t have 36 sports like Los Angeles, and the sports added for LA could be competing for the same spots.

Still, the story looks less like “The Olympics tried breaking, everyone laughed, and they immediately got rid of it.”

Paris wanted breaking. Los Angeles didn’t. Brisbane might.

Less dramatic, but closer to what happened.

I started out assuming breaking had auditioned for the Olympics and failed spectacularly. It turns out nobody invited it back, which is different.

So breaking’s Olympic career currently consists of one memorable weekend in Paris. One gold for Ami, one for Phil Wizard, and roughly 47 billion kangaroo-hop memes.

I wouldn’t roll up the cardboard just yet.