State Champ Radio olympics
Trending on Billboard
Good news! Wicked: For Good is coming soon, and so are the Winter Olympics — as advertised in two new magical videos promoting the biennial event featuring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.
In one clip posted by NBC Sports on Thursday (Nov. 5), the Tony-winning actress who portrays Elphaba in Jon M. Chu’s live-action adaptations of the Broadway musical joins the United States curling team for practice. As they struggle with a faulty broom, Erivo holds up her character’s signature mode of travel and says knowingly, “Try this.”
When the gravity-defying broomstick helps the team achieve its desired results, Erivo does the adorable BFF wave that she and the R.E.M. Beauty founder do in the first Wicked film.
Speaking of Grande, a second clip posted Thursday by NBC opens with figure skating champion Alysa Liu performing a breathtaking routine on the ice before something like an earthquake interrupts her. The camera then zooms out to show that the athlete is actually inside of a snow globe, which the pop star has been gazing into and shaking.
The videos come just a few weeks ahead of the Nov. 21 premiere of the Wicked sequel in theaters, almost exactly one year after the first film arrived and shattered box-office records. Less than three months after the saga comes to a close, the Winter Olympics will kick off Feb. 6 on NBC and Peacock.
The partnership between Wicked and the Olympics marks a full-circle moment, as both Erivo and Grande attended the Summer Games in 2024 as part of their mammoth press cycle for the first film. Universal Pictures also arranged for the real-life Emerald City train from the movies to stop through Paris in honor of the event.
For the second film, the promotional blitz has been noticeably more lowkey, with Grande recently confirming that this was an intentional move to keep the film feeling like it was in the hands of true fans. This week, the first international premiere of Wicked: For Good took place in Brazil, although the two-time Grammy winner was forced to miss the event due to a “safety issue” with her flight.
“i am so heartbroken that i’m unable to be there with you all,” she wrote Tuesday (Nov. 4) on her Instagram Story, urging fans not to “wish danger” on her just because they felt upset by her absence. “we sincerely tried everything we could and i apologize from the bottom of my heart.”
Watch Erivo and Grande star in new ads for the Winter Olympics below.
Trending on Billboard Sunny day! Elmo and his friends are inviting the world to come and play at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina in Italy. As announced Tuesday (Oct. 28), the furry red monster is bringing Cookie Monster, Grover and more muppet pals to the Games in February to help with NBCUniversal’s […]
If you’re tired of Kendrick Lamar, he’s not going anywhere for at least three years. Earlier Thursday (March 20), Casey Wasserman — the head of the Wasserman talent agency and the chairman of the 2028 L.A. Olympics organizing committee — spoke with The Associated Press in Greece during the 14th International Olympic Committee session and […]
From Usher’s Super Bowl showcase to the most musically talented Met, appearances related to major sporting events helped artists across genres — and at different career points — earn sizable streaming gains in 2024. (All data according to Luminate.)
And the trend has continued so far in 2025: Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show on Feb. 9 was a major boost for the rapper.
UsherSuper Bowl LVIII (Feb. 11)
The combination of Usher’s career-spanning medley during his spectacular Super Bowl halftime show and the release of his album Coming Home two days earlier helped his streaming catalog skyrocket 299% compared with the previous week, with his 2004 smash “Yeah!” among the biggest gainers.
Jennifer HudsonNBA All-Star Game (Feb. 18)
The R&B veteran’s halftime show medley of her songs “Remission” and “I Got This” at Indianapolis’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse helped give her catalog a 4% boost in weekly streams.
Trending on Billboard
Candelita“OMG” On-Field Performance (June 28)
New Yorks Mets infielder Jose Iglesias moonlights as the recording artist Candelita, and his live debut of his single “OMG” following a Mets game at Citi Field helped the song move over 1,000 weekly downloads and top the Latin Digital Song Sales chart.
Gojira2024 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony (July 26)
Lady Gaga and Céline Dion were among the stars helping ring in the Summer Games in Paris, but French rockers Gojira grabbed headlines by becoming the first metal band to perform at the Olympics. Its catalog earned a 283% streaming bump over the next four days in the process.
Kavinsky2024 Summer Olympics Closing Ceremony (Aug. 11)
As athletes said au revoir to Paris by joining Phoenix, Air and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig onstage, French producer Kavinsky dropped his 2010 synthwave single “Nightcall,” causing a Shazam sensation and boosting the track’s streams by 74%.
BeyoncéNFL Christmas Day Halftime Show (Dec. 25)
During Netflix’s first NFL Christmas showcase, Queen Bey presented songs from her Cowboy Carter album live for the first time at NRG Stadium in her hometown of Houston — and the album shot from 7.4 million weekly streams to 17.6 million during the following week, up 137%.
Kendrick LamarSuper Bowl LIX
Kendrick Lamar was already one of the world’s most-streamed artists, but his riveting halftime show at Super Bowl LIX on Sunday (Feb. 9) helped his biggest hits — and his entire discography — climb even higher. On Feb. 10, the day after his performance at New Orleans’ Caesars Superdome, Lamar’s streaming catalog earned 70.9 million official U.S. on-demand streams — a 153% increase from the previous Monday’s total (27.5 million on Feb. 3), according to Luminate. Similar spikes occurred for halftime highlights “Squabble Up” (up 159% in daily streams) and “TV Off” (up 139%), while “Not Like Us” earned an even greater uptick (up 222%); meanwhile, Lamar’s costar SZA, who joined him on two songs during the showcase, saw her own streaming catalog soar, up 58% to 30.3 million streams on the day after the big game.
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
HipHopWired Featured Video
Raygun, a b-girl who competed for Australia at the inaugural breaking competition at this year’s Summer Olympics, turned heads during the event with some questionable dance moves and went viral in memes. Raygun announced during an interview with an Australian outlet that she is no longer going to compete in breaking and will retire.
Raygun, real name Rachael Gunn, was a guest on The Jimmy & Nath Show and explained why she’s walking away from the sport of breaking after receiving negative commentary regarding her time in the competition. In so many words, Gunn says that her love of dancing led her to the world stage but that competing is no longer on the table for her after the backlash.
“I’m not going to compete anymore, no,” Gunn said earlier this week. “I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems really difficult for me to do now to approach a battle.”
Away from breaking, Gunn is an educator for Macquarie University Faculty of Arts for its Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature. Gunn famously penned her PhD thesis, “Deterritorializing gender in Sydney’s breakdancing scene: a B-girl’s experience of B-boying,” from her standpoint of becoming involved with breaking in her home country.
Raygun didn’t score one point during her time in the Summer Olympics breaking event, prompting many online to believe she was placed on the stage as a means to draw ratings or cause controversy. Gunn has since shot down the claim.
—
Photo: Getty
Celine Dion‘s heart will definitely go on for Kelly Clarkson. Following the Kelly Clarkson Show host’s powerful Kellyoke cover of the icon’s classic Titanic ballad “My Heart Will Go On,” Dion shared a tearful reaction to the tribute in a video posted to social media on Tuesday (Oct. 8). “I just saw you singing ‘My […]
Australian breaker Rachael Gunn, or “b-girl Raygun,” holds the top spot in her sport’s latest world rankings despite Olympic performances that led to online ridicule. On Tuesday, the sport’s governing body issued a statement to “provide clarity” on why Raygun tops the rankings. Raygun, a 37-year-old university lecturer from Sydney, failed to score any points at […]
The closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Paralympics Games leaned fully into French electronic music, and with dazzling results. The ceremony, which happened at Paris’ Stade De France on Sept. 8, assembled not only athletes, but a legendary crew of French dance producers that included the pioneering Jean Michel Jarre, Ed Banger founder Busy P, […]
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: John Walton – PA Images / Getty
Australian Olympic “breaker” Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, has, apparently, been having a rough go of it ever since she embarrassed herself in front of the world by flopping around on the Olympic stage, doing what looked like an impersonation of either a kangaroo, bunny or velociraptor while hopping around like a toddler trying to get her mother’s attention — and calling it breakdancing.
We all saw the way Gunn’s performance prompted an onslaught of memes, gifs and relentless mocking on social media. There was even a petition against her that some 58,000 people signed. The internet dragging was well-deserved, but it appears it put the 37-year-old in a state of distress that she’s still working her way out of. Apparently, the worldwide reaction to Gunn’s culture-vulturing nonsense on social media and on late-night television has harmed her mental health, which is why she has made an effort to stay away from all of it — but she still felt the need to tell us all about it, of course.
From Deadline:
And she hasn’t even seen the Jimmy Fallon-Rachel Dratch parody. “I don’t think I’m in the place yet to watch it,” she says in a new interview with the Australian network television show The Project.
“I knew that I was going to get beaten, and I knew that people were not going to understand my style and what I was going to do,” the 37-year-old breaker said. “The odds were against me, that’s for sure.”
“Fortunately I got some mental health support pretty quickly and I also went off social media,” she added.
Elsewhere during the The Project interview, Gunn apologized for the negative attention she’s brought to the new Olympic sport. “I am very sorry for the backlash that the community has experienced,” she said, “but I can’t control how people react.”
I mean, one could argue that she absolutely could have controlled how people reacted — by not taking her talentless, rhythmless self up on that stage in the first place.
It’s arguable that all Gunn did when she (literally) hopped up on that stage was single-handedly ensure that the breaking completion never had a fair shot at being taken seriously at the Olympics.
Gunn—who holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and examines the cultural politics of breaking, bringing both academic and artistic perspectives—had also previously defended herself in a way that indicates she cares nothing about the culture she supposedly studied and was more concerned with the spotlight and what it did for her personally.
“What I wanted to do was come out here and do something new and different and creative — that’s my strength, my creativity,” she said. “I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative because how many chances do you get in a lifetime to do that on an international stage.”
If Gunn really cared about the culture she supposedly studied, she wouldn’t want to be the only thing people would remember about the time breaking came to the Olympics, which will likely not happen again in 2028.
But, sure, I guess it’s good she’s taking care of her mental health or whatever. Good luck with all that.
Flavor Flav served as a hype man and official sponsor of the U.S. water polo Olympic teams at the 2024 Games. Now, he’s looking to take his involvement to another level when the 2028 Olympics return to the USA in Los Angeles. The Public Enemy rapper joined iHeart’s Politickin podcast hosted by California’s Gov. Gavin […]
