Headline : Breaking Gold Medalist Phil Wizard Says Raygun Doesn’t Deserve the Meme Machine’s Wrath

Read more from the original article on here at www.wired.com.

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Phil Wizard isn’t Raygun. In a conversation with WIRED contributor Dexter Thomas at Tuesday’s Big Interview event, the Canadian b-boy and Olympic gold medalist went out of his way to differentiate his work and that of his peers from that of the much-maligned Australian b-girl.

While Wizard (real name: Phil Kim) says he has immense sympathy for Raygun, saying no one deserves to be bullied or mocked as she has in the months that have followed this summer’s Paris Games, he also said she didn’t have the high level of talent and expertise that other breakers at the Olympics possessed. Noting that Raygun reached the Games by winning the Oceania qualifiers, which were held rather last-minute and with relatively few competitors, Wizard said it was “unfortunate” that the narrative coming out of breaking’s Olympic debut was focused on her.

Wizard added that gaps in ability like the ones between Raygun and her fellow breakers isn’t all that unusual in other sports. There are always swimmers, runners, and other athletes that qualify for competition that never really have a chance of getting a medal. But because breaking has a subjective judging system, he said, the average Olympic viewer couldn’t really understand that she was “significantly worse than other people.”

While breaking isn’t slated for inclusion in the 2028 Games in Los Angeles—something that was already planned before the Paris games, pre-Raygun—Wizard said that if the sport was to appear, he would hope that changes would be implemented to make judging and scoring more transparent. While events like figure skating or gymnastics have both technical and artistic criteria laid out for competitors, spectators, judges, and commentators to see, breaking doesn’t, with judging ultimately becoming much more opaque and subjective.

Read more from the original article on here at www.wired.com.

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