How Raygun earned her spot — fair and square — as an Olympics breaker

In October 2023, members of the World DanceSport Federation, or WDSF, learned breaking, the sport they’d been trying to make happen at the Olympics for years, would not be appearing at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. In response, the organization’s president, Shawn Tay, made a grand proclamation. “Ensuring the success of breaking’s Olympic debut at Paris 2024 is therefore on the forefront of the WDSF agenda,” he said. “Our performance in Paris will define the future of dance sport within the Olympic Movement.” …Oops? Going into the games, breaking had a lot riding on its shoulders. But no one counted on Raygun — the newly infamous, 36-year-old, last-place Australian b-girl (as breakers are called) whose performance on the Paris stage included bizarre floor-writhing, awkward freezes, and “original” moves like kangaroo hops. [Media: https://twitter.com/alex_abads/status/1821945716064821450] Raygun, real name Rachael Gunn, instantly became a viral sensation — notoriety that only skyrocketed when the public learned that Gunn, who won none of her Olympics battles, actually has a PhD in breakdancing. Yes, really. Gunn’s performance has not only overshadowed the two actual breaking gold medalists, Japan’s Yuasa Ami and Canada’s Phil Wizard (plus 16-year-old Australian b-boy Jeff Dunne), it’s arguably become the defining moment of a Parisian Games marked by controversy and absurdity. But alongside widespread mockery of Gunn herself runs speculation that Gunn’s presence at the Games had to be some sort of mistake, even corruption. Surely, this couldn’t be the best Australia had to offer? How did Raygun wind up at the Olympics when, for example, last weekend in Melbourne a couple of b-girls were serving these moves? [Media: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-j58k_SuxM] To answer this question, we have to go on a bit of a deep dive — so let’s (sorry) hop on in. Reports Raygun manipulated her way into the Olympics couldn’t be further from the truth… For decades, the WDSF was devoted to ballroom dancing. The association started in the late ’90s with a focus on winning a place in the Olympics for ballroom dancing before its subsequent pivot, around 2017, toward breaking. A quizzical backstory, yes — but it doesn’t make the organization less legitimate. Te Hiiritanga Wepiha, a.k.a. Rush, one of the judges in the women’s breaking final for the Oceania championship Gunn won, posted a 90-minute livestreamed Instagram commentary on Tuesday in response to the controversy. He pointed out that the WDSF judging system, used in the Olympics and its breaking qualifiers, requires judges to be veterans in the breaking scene, both as competitors and as judges, as well as to pass multiple exams. “You have to be trained to be a judge,” he insisted. This wasn’t Gunn’s first rodeo either. Prior to her Olympics appearance, she represented Australia at multiple World Championship competitions between 2021 and 2023. She judged Red Bull’s preeminent BC One breaking contest. She’s an established local champ. Yet following Gunn’s appearance at the Olympics, a petition circulated claiming, without sources, that Gunn and her husband, breaking coach Samuel Free, had manipulated the entire WDSF system in order to gain a spot at the Olympics. The petition falsely claimed Gunn had judged herself at the qualifying Oceania championship competition — despite the judges’ list for the event being readily available on the WDSF website. Other rumors further alleged, again without any apparent sourcing, that Gunn and her husband were the masterminds behind the Australian Breaking Association, better known as AUSBreaking — another easily debunked claim. An AUSBreaking spokesperson further confirmed to Vox in an email that Gunn and her husband did not found the organization. Gunn doesn’t appear to be directly responsible for managing, or funding, any breaking group, which likely also negates the petition’s claim that she denied travel funding to a marginalized dance crew from Australia’s Northern Territory. …But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand how she got there The subtext of this criticism — that Gunn benefited from her whiteness — has merit. Gunn was educated at one of Sydney’s most elite high schools; she had the opportunity to get a PhD in an obscure field, and the wealth to fund appearances at international breaking competitions. Her white privilege in a dance scene rife with cultural appropriation makes her an easy target for criticism. At the same time, some have tried to argue she represents exactly the opposite — a “diversity hire” and Australian “wokeness” gone wrong. “People have jumped on and used her as the new scapegoat to further their cause,” Wepiha observed in his livestream. “We never thought this would happen,” he told me. “She’s getting torn down by a lot of people.” Still, while the rest of the world has put Gunn through the ringer since her Paris appearance, the actual breaking community seems to have rallied behind her. “This is what happens when people outside of our dance want to control the narrative but have absolutely no expertise of technical knowledge on our dance, particularly in an Oceania context,” Dujon Cullingford, a veteran New Zealand breaker who attended the Oceania qualifiers, told me. Cullingford wrote a Facebook post arguing against the idea Gunn benefited from any factor besides a small talent pool. He emphasized that Oceania’s breaking community is tiny; one of Gunn’s own articles placed the number of Australian breakers at around 400, total, and Wepiha claimed the WDSF had to “get people out of retirement in order to make up the numbers” of competitors. One of the main criticisms being bandied about concerns a public perception that the WDSF must not have been promoting their events among “real” breaking scenes, but rather elitist communities like universities. But both Cullingford and Wepiha rejected this idea. “It’s very easy to know if there’s a jam on because the scene is tiny,” Wepiha said. “Down here, like other countries, we feel the squeeze of cost of living, and the breaking scene is small so it doesn’t produce a lot of people who have time to teach, lead crews, and mobilize the community in the same way,” Cullingford said. He noted that, further diminishing the small talent pool, many breakers chose not to compete in the Olympics qualifiers because they didn’t want to shell out the cash needed to travel to the competition in Sydney last November. Additionally, many breakers simply had no interest in participating due to the feeling that the efforts of the establishment to rope breaking into the rigid organizational structure of the Games was antithetical to street dance culture. According to Wepiha, many dancers felt informal jams are more expressive with less strict judging — the kind of breaking they want to do, as opposed to Olympic-level battling. And then there was Raygun. “She rocked up like everybody else,” Wepiha said in his livestream regarding Gunn’s Oceania qualifier. “She won fair and square.” He pointed out that of the 10 judges at the event, only one was white and none were Australian — a fact AUSBreaking also confirmed to Vox. “She won by majority decision, she battled like everyone else … it’s not that deep.” You can judge for yourself: in the Oceania Championships Raygun won which secured her spot in the Olympics, she netted 51 overall points to 50 scored by her opponent Holy Molly (Molly Chapman). The crucial final points came in this battle when the pair faced off, with Raygun winning two of three rounds. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MorhA98eK7M] Since Gunn became a viral sensation, many people have watched this battle and claimed that Molly was the clear winner, but it’s not so simple. For one thing, these judges had seen their overall performances throughout the competition. If Molly was recycling moves from previous battles while Raygun kept things unique, the judges probably would have favored Raygun. Other factors to keep in mind include things like who was more on beat, which dancer spent more time on floor moves as opposed to the transitional dance moves called toprock, whose movements were stronger and more fluid, whose moves were crisper and more precise, and whose transitions were more interesting. Prior to this, both Chapman and Gunn competed in the World Championships in Belgium in September 2023. While neither of them qualified then, out of 80 competitors, Gunn ranked 64th — a full 15 slots ahead of Chapman, who came in next to last. All of this means, despite the viral narrative that’s attached to her, it isn’t as simple as writing Gunn’s Olympics entrance off as a hilarious fluke or a mark of privileged corruption. Indeed, according to Gunn, she intended to bring a style of movement to the Paris Games that was less about meeting expectations and more about making an indelible impact. “What I wanted to do was come out here and do something new and different and creative — that’s my strength, my creativity,” Gunn told ESPN. “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.” Score by score, Raygun’s dancing isn’t actually that bad. Really. Gunn has been reflecting on what her style is for some time. In one of her academic articles on breaking, she argues, “Gender norms both articulate and limit my corporeal potential.” Gunn has also written about what she sees as the dance’s “normative construction” of masculinity. In other words, the weirdness of Gunn’s dance … might be the whole point. Moreover, in more informal breaking venues, it’s not even that weird. “What Raygun showcased at the Olympics is that breaking is a spectrum,” Wepiha said in his livestream. He argued her style represents that more informal, self-expressive side of street dance. “She went up there and did what a lot of you complaining could never do. She was her authentic self.” You may well ask: But don’t we have to hold Olympians to a higher standard of excellence? Even if that excellence is forged from a masculinist construction of athleticism and dance? Well… do we? There’s every indication Gunn is currently the most famous b-girl in the world, and while most people are laughing at her, not with her, somewhere in the wide vast world of breaking, other b-girls may feel inspired rather than shamed and mortified. After all, even by the Olympic standards, Gunn didn’t do that badly. If you look at the judges’ scoring, for example, of her battle with US breaker Logistx, you can see that while she nabbed zero rounds, a handful of judges had her beating Logistx in some subcategories, usually originality. Meanwhile, while Logistx won most categories, she typically only won by a few percentage points at best. In other words, Gunn arguably held her own at the Olympics under a once-in-a-lifetime amount of pressure, and she did it while trying out her own unique style. Was it great? No. Was it bad? Evidently not as bad as we thought. The ambiguity leaves us with a mess; many (though certainly not all) of the people heaping criticism upon Gunn are people who barely knew what breaking was a fortnight ago, while many of the people rushing to defend her are breaking veterans. In between are the people who just want to meme. The situation has some Australian breakers worried the backlash will drive away sponsors and support — which, Wepiha told me, was already a concern given the lack of government funding for breaking as an art form. As for Gunn, “Above all she’s a human being,” Wepiha said. “We first and foremost just hope that she’s all right.” Yet if there’s one thing we know about breaking, it’s that it takes a lot more than ridicule to, well, break it.