Australian breaker Raygun went viral after the Olympics and was the subject of misinformation. She says now that she’s retired from competition.
Breaking made its debut at the 2024 Paris Olympics — and while she didn’t earn a spot on the podium, the Australian breaker Rachael Gunn, known as Raygun, has received plenty of recognition online.
Gunn is a 36-year-old lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney whose research focuses on the „cultural politics of breaking“, according to her faculty profile.
But Gunn’s time on the Olympic stage was short-lived. The B-girl was eliminated during the round-robin stage of the women’s breaking competition, losing in one-on-one battles to the United States‘ Logistx, France’s Syssy, and Lithuania’s Nicka.
Raygun didn’t earn a point in any of those battles, but as clips of her performance spread online, she got something else: instant meme status. That online notoriety, however, paved the way for online harassment and misinformation about her Olympic qualification — and three months after the Olympics concluded, Gunn said that she was retiring from competition.
Here’s what you need to know about Raygun.Raygun, an academic who studies breaking, also competed internationally
Before Gunn went to the Olympics, she approached the 2024 Games from an academic perspective.
With her coauthor, Lucas Marie, Gunn published an article in the June 2023 issue of Global Hip Hop Studies titled „The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification.“ The article examined how the Olympics‘ institutionalization would affect the Australian breaking scene.
Alongside her academic career, Gunn was a competing B-girl. But before she got into breaking, she had experience with ballroom dancing, jazz, hip-hop, salsa, and tap, The Australian Women’s Weekly reported. Gunn told The Sydney Morning Herald that her husband, Samuel Free, introduced her to breaking in 2008 while they were at university.
Gunn told Women’s Weekly that breaking „hooked“ her in 2012, around the time that she began her doctoral program in cultural studies. She began competing more seriously in 2018 and eventually set her sights on the Olympics.
According to her university profile, she was the top-ranked B-girl of the Australian Breaking Association in 2020 and 2021, representing the country at the World DanceSport Federation Breaking Championships in 2021, 2022, and 2023. She also won the WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships in 2023.
„My bag always has two main things: It’s like, my knee pads and my laptop“, Gunn said on the podcast „The Female Athlete Project.“ „Because I need my knee-pads to break. And then, yeah, just do some emails quickly. Or like, do some revisions on a chapter I submitted, or copyedit this article I did, or moderate those grades.“
The athlete also told the Herald that she preferred to wear „baggy jeans and a baggy T-shirt“ while breaking.
„I like the heaviness they bring“, Gunn said. „Maybe it’s my background in hip-hop, but having weight closer to the ground works for me, gets me in the right headspace.“Raygun’s performances at the Olympics sparked memes and criticism
Raygun took the stage at the Olympics wearing a tracksuit in Australia’s green and gold, breaking out moves that included hopping like a kangaroo. Her performances attracted attention online and memes that compared her moves to, among other things, dancing children.
The fact that RayGun has a Ph.D in breakdancing is its own commentary on academia vs real world expertise. https://t.co/pQcL8HzAW9
me forcing my mom to watch the dance i made up in the pool pic.twitter.com/zbtwEFjpTG
Judges made the right call here because what was that move lol #Olympics #Breakdancing pic.twitter.com/sXAs9AdHjX
But some critics argued that Raygun’s performance didn’t represent breaking — a sport that will not return to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Breaking came from Black and brown communities in the Bronx in the 1970s. Malik Dixon, an African American man who lives in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Gunn came off as „somebody who was toying with the culture“ during a significant moment for the sport.
