This—¯_(ツ)_/¯—is what comes to mind when people ask me to explain how Australia ran fourth in the Olympics yet also entered Raygun—the Paris Olympiad’s Eddie the Eagle or Eric the Eel—into an event.

　　The 2024 Olympics had two blokes win in women’s boxing, a US gymnast who got a medal taken off her, given to her, then swiped away again (after the podium presentation to boot), and a Frenchman who knocked the pole vault bar off with his willy. This came on top of a polluted Seine and an opening ceremony consistent with historic French decadence but not with historic French class.

　　“I see the Seine is the only river in the world that flows upside down,” one friend quipped. “All the shit’s on the top.”

　　For Raygun to top that lot with what is probably Australia’s greatest sporting faceplant is quite something. Rachael Gunn was more than Twitter’s main character: she became an object of global fascination, and at the time of writing, still is. Much of the perplexity is borne of the contrast between her nation’s obvious sporting success—not only at this Olympics—and her own lack of ability.

　　Australia doesn’t produce world-beaters in every sport—no nation does, not even behemoths like China or the USA, or the Soviet Union and East Germany back in Cold War days—but its standards are consistently high. Meanwhile, Australia’s best male athletes often don’t aspire to the Olympics. It’s possible to make a good living playing one of the country’s four football codes (rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules football, association football), or, alternatively, cricket—Australia’s true national game. More recently, professional netball has started swiping talented women, especially if they’re tall.

　　Given Australia has roughly the same population as Texas while doing all this, it’s reasonable to ask why this team from a tiny country is, as NPR put it, “an Olympic superpower.”

　　Some of the reasons are localised: Australia is wealthy and well-governed (think Switzerland, but in the southern hemisphere). It also has a deceptively large population in genetic terms (thanks to high rates of both immigration and intermarriage), as I explained to James Patterson in a Law Liberty podcast earlier this month. This means a surfeit of local talent and the money to spot it.

　　However, part of this phenomenon is rooted in Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth, which requires further explanation.

　　Two and a half years ago, Rachel Lu wrote what remains the best article ever published in Law Liberty: “The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples.” Much of her piece turns on the astonishing British ability to invent high-quality, participatory, community-building team sports that then “go global.” This flair, as she points out, also emerged throughout the Commonwealth (as Australians and Canadians developed Australian rules football and ice hockey) and that other English-speaking superpower, the USA (with the invention of basketball and baseball). Her argument concerns all those countries, not just Australia. It is true to greater or lesser degrees for all of them.

　　This passage applies with particular intensity to Australia, however:

　　In the English-speaking world, we value rule of law. Within the realm of law, personal excellence and innovation become more possible, because people trust that their labors will be worthwhile. This observation is commonplace in the realm of political theory, and in economics, but it is equally relevant to sport. Team sports involve a delicate balance between cooperation and competition, which can only be achieved with the help of complex rules, authoritative referees, and players who respect the game itself. Without that shared respect, team sports will never reach high levels of excellence. Why would anyone spend years cultivating the idiosyncratic skill set needed to be (say) an elite right tackle, unless he trusted that the game would be played properly? Those efforts can only pay off in a game with clear rules, reliable referees, and a general understanding that all will uphold the integrity of the game.

　　When team sports are played well, they have their own kind of dynamism, which mirrors the fruitfulness we see in free markets, and free cultures. The broader dynamics are similar. A successful team must harness the talents of individual players, but those individuals must also cooperate, understanding themselves to be part of a larger whole. As in every other area of life, it can be quite difficult to find the correct balance between fostering individual excellence and encouraging group cohesion. That’s why it is so difficult to invent a good team sport. There’s a reason so many cultures have fallen back on the obvious: just seeing who can run the fastest.

　　When I was a child, my father pointed out that every liberal democracy on earth embodied—in some way, often idiosyncratic—the French tripartite motto: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

　　However, because other liberal democracies are not France, they emphasise different aspects of her revolutionary hendiatris. The US is the land of liberté. France herself, meanwhile, cares most about égalité. Australia’s core social value, however, was and is fraternité, which my father always translated using a term associated with trade unions: solidarity.

　　Politically, where the US favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, Australia favours democracy and majorities over liberty and rights. From the mid-nineteenth-century onwards, the country acquired a reputation as “the working man’s paradise” thanks to high wages and a powerful trade union movement. Its electoral system—with its extensive use of compulsion, referendums, and demands that all the people must decide—underwrites what my father considered a form of secular communitarianism.

　　Just as popular culture doesn’t really belong in the academy, the academy doesn’t really belong in the Olympics.

　　The best explanation for Raygun’s terrible effort and her presence at the Olympics amid a stellar performance from an able national team is this: she emerged from a tradition that does not enshrine excellence. That tradition is the academy. Yes, Rachael Gunn has a PhD in “cultural studies.” She lectures in it at Australia’s Macquarie University. It’s called Deterritorializing Gender in Sydneys Breakdancing scene: a B-girl’s Experience of B-boying. Follow the link. I promise I am not making this up.

　　Since opening the universities to the less able and then teaching them things like cultural studies (calculus and Chaucer are too hard, I’m afraid), the academy’s midwits have decided the rest of us need to hear about their scholarly infatuations with often inferior products of popular culture. This is why there are entire papers written on Big Brother (the reality telly show, not George Orwell and 1984) and entire doctoral theses written on … breakdancing. And yes, while I’m aware that Raygun is Australia’s academic humiliation, Americans should recall that their nation’s superior appellate court was forced to tell its universities to stop admitting thickos. That universities are now full of dimbulbs among both staff and students is a global problem.

　　Going down the Raygun rabbit hole meant I established that Gunn and her husband didn’t rig the selection trials, and hadn’t used their positions to prevent funding going to more talented dancers from rural and regional Australia. Nonetheless, selections for Australia’s breaking athletes were cocked up in a way that seldom occurs in such a well-run, sporty country. They were organised and promoted by an outfit traditionally oriented towards competitive ballroom dancing (something at which Australia also excels—don’t ask, just watch Strictly Ballroom and all will be revealed), and which only added breaking as an afterthought.

　　Rachael Gunn does have a professional background in dance choreography and is clearly much fitter and more coordinated than most 36-year-olds. Footage of her doing “a better performance at the Closing Ceremony” while she was out and about with the rest of the Australian team would seem to indicate someone who probably isn’t of Olympic standard and who still shouldn’t have been there, but she can nonetheless dance.

　　For whatever reason, Gunn decided that the academy was her route into both an art form and a sport. Unfortunately, she brought with her the academy’s norms, and they ran slap-bang into Australian sport’s intense focus on excellence. Merit vs. Inclusion went with Raygun to the Olympics: the results were not pretty. Special prize to the wag who suggested we “make an Anzac biscuit in the shape of Australia’s greatest treasure.” One can see this not only in the memes (oh my, the memes), but also in the skill of various Paralympian breakdancers with whom Raygun was often compared.

　　The Paralympics, you see, aren’t “inclusive” either. The athletes may be disabled, but they are still exceptional athletes. Watch these blokes incorporate crutches into their routine and tell me it isn’t incredible. I’m not convinced breaking should be a competitive sport for either Olympians or Paralympians, but those crutch guys are good. Dr Dre’s point that poor quality breaking at the Olympics leads people to think the entire art form/sport is rubbish is also a fair one. I mean, my partner was suggesting a new Olympic sport after we ate too many blackberries on one of our walks. “Could do anything for Britain, I suppose.”

　　After the world and his wife had a giant belly laugh—and as part of her new role as social media’s main character—Gunn was dogpiled in a way familiar to anyone who’s experienced a public cancellation. People like comedian Graham Linehan or philosopher Kathleen Stock could probably comment usefully here. This led Australia’s chef de mission, Anna Meares—an astonishingly accomplished track cyclist—to intervene and defend her. Part of Meares’s defence turned on Gunn’s willingness to “have a go.” Having a go forms part of Australia’s commendable cultural solidarity: you don’t know until you try, so why not be in it? A famed Australian advertising campaign turned on the slogan Life: Be in It.

　　Unfortunately (and Meares knows this), the Olympics is not the place to “have a go.” You have a go when you’re first starting out. Raygun represents, I’m afraid, the opposite of excellence—the summit of all shall have prizes. Yes, I get that the academy shouldn’t be like this—and wasn’t always—but it is now. Just as popular culture doesn’t really belong in the academy, the academy doesn’t really belong in the Olympics, either, in part because the academy has stopped, in recent years, being about excellence.

　　I do think its to the nation’s credit that other athletes in the Australian team—not just Meares—protected Raygun. They went to great lengths—in that intensely loyal Australian way—to defend her from hyperbolic trolling, to evince solidarity. If she’s at all capable of introspection, it may change her view of her country. Like many of her kind, she’s an aficionado of the fashionable brain rot known as decolonisation. Sport in Australia “is connected to a kind of idealised settler-colonial masculinity” she says, while breaking’s inclusion in the Olympics will institutionalise “this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized (sic) and gendered hierarchies.” Righto then.

　　The takeaway, I suppose, is that you cannot have humouring and headpatting in the Olympics from the country that runs fourth overall. Eddie the Eagle amused a lot of people but was also the butt of a lot of jokes. The IOC changed the rules after the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary so there wouldn’t be a repeat. This, I suspect, is because Eddie was from the UK, a rich country. Eric the Eel, by contrast, raised everyone’s spirits in Sydney 2000 because he came from a developing nation with a wildcard entry.

　　He really was having a go.