Raygun's Olympic breaking broke the internet and continues to polarise
Australia achieved its greatest-ever medal haul at the Paris Olympics, but 12 months on, the enduring memory is of a white, middle-class, 30-something B-girl in a cheap green-and-gold tracksuit crashing out of the breaking competition in the first round.
Going by the name Raygun, Rachael Gunn seared herself into the collective imagination with a series of moves that failed to impress the judges but launched a torrent of memes, vitriol, and hot takes.
Was she punking the Olympics? Was the routine, with its imitations of kangaroos and sprinklers, ironic – a playfully knowing appropriation of Australian iconography? Or was she simply having an off day?
Whatever the case, Gunn's routine, the reaction to it, and how she subsequently carried herself, combined to create a confounding cultural moment.
"To be honest, I get mental whiplash thinking about this topic," marketing strategist Christina Aventi tells Australian Story.
"It's just a confusing mess. And it's hard to make sense of."
There are so many strands to the Raygun phenomenon that it's hard to neatly untangle any of them.
Even the initial responses to her routine were wildly varied and often contradictory.
Back in Australia, some simply saw it as funny – something in the spirit of Roy and HG's The Dream – and didn't care if it was serious or a piss-take.
But for others, the Olympics represent a rare opportunity for Australians to punch above their weight on the global stage, and thanks to Raygun, people all around the world were laughing at us.
"It's clear that it really touched a nerve around our cultural, athletic identity," Aventi says.
"It was our best performing Olympics yet, that was somewhat overshadowed by this routine that looked more eisteddfod than Olympics."
There is, of course, a rich tradition of heroic Olympic failures — think Eddie the Eagle, Eric the Eel, the Jamaican bobsled team, even Australia's own Steven Bradbury, who speed-skated to victory, only because all his competitors crashed out.
But as Aventi points out, Gunn does not fit neatly into that pantheon of losers.
"They have backstories that people respond to really positively because they're hard-luck stories; they're against-all-the-odds stories," she says.
"And in this case, we've got a uni professor who doesn't look like a breaker, who's wearing a green-and-gold tracksuit that looks like it's straight out of Lowes.
"It just doesn't quite stack up to some of those other stories we love."
Criticism of Raygun's routine did not just come from Australians with a bruised sense of national pride.
For some in the international breaking community, her performance was insultingly amateurish.
"The anger that came from Raygun's performance at the Olympics comes from a lot of different places," explains New York artist and breaking pioneer Michael Holman.
"A slice of that pie came from people who knew what breaking was, saying, 'Wow, you know, that's not great breaking.'"
But a bigger issue for Holman — and one that Gunn, an academic interested in the cultural politics of breaking, seemed oddly unprepared for — was that of cultural appropriation and insensitivity.
"Part of the magic of hip hop culture is the fact that it was created by marginalised teenagers, poor and working-class black and Puerto Rican kids who came from nothing," Holman says.
"So her being white and Australian and jumping around like a kangaroo, that's going to be a loaded gun.
"Whether she intended it or not, the end result was mockery."
She was ridiculed by US tonight show hosts, eviscerated by countless bloggers, and falsely accused of everything from gaming the system to being responsible for breaking not being part of the 2028 Olympics.
There were concerns for her mental health in the days after the event. Australia's Olympic chef de mission Anna Meares defended Gunn publicly, calling out "trolls and keyboard warriors" for their misogyny and abuse.
Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came to her defence, although "Raygun had a crack" was perhaps not the most ringing of prime ministerial endorsements.
Initially, Gunn seemed to handle the situation well.
Although the criticism clearly stung, she appeared willing to make fun of herself, breaking into an impromptu routine and throwing kangaroo poses as the Australian Olympic team prepared for the Closing Ceremony.
"I think there was a sense that it was a cultural moment," says journalist Jordan Baker, who covered the Paris Olympics for The Sydney Morning Herald.
"She gave an unusual performance. It was fun. We'll rally behind her."
It was a musical, of all things, that changed all that.
Comedian Stephanie Broadbridge didn't even watch Gunn's Olympic routine but became fascinated by how she handled herself in the aftermath.
Broadbridge had been through her own social media pile-on in 2023 when a video of her trying not to laugh as a male comedian told a joke was viewed more than 150 million times, provoking a torrent of cruel and misogynistic comments.
She was traumatised by the experience and found something admirable in Gunn's refusal to apologise for herself.
"Raygun never backed down, and I was like, I love this. This is such an interesting thing from a woman," Broadbridge says.
"Women don't usually behave like that publicly, and I was so excited that there was one around my age doing that."
Broadbridge looked at the heightened emotion around the Raygun phenomenon and decided it had all the elements of a musical.
"She's the hero that Australia needed; the female Shane Warne. The one that's flawed but we love her anyway," she says.
"I wanted to tell that story. I wanted an Australian larrikin story that was a woman."
And that's when things got weird.
Days before the opening performance of Raygun: The Musical, Broadbridge received a cease-and-desist letter from Gunn's lawyers demanding that the show not go ahead because it violated her intellectual property and could damage her brand.
"The dance moves were copyrighted, the silhouette was trademarked. Basically, every element," Broadbridge explains.
Baker says this was "the point where a lot of people lost sympathy for Rachael".
"People who had backed her the whole way felt like this was a betrayal of their support for her," she says.
"When the heavy-handed legal threats started coming, it seemed mean-spirited; it seemed like she was no longer even remotely trying to lean into the joke."
When Gunn addressed the outcry in an Instagram video, it only made things worse.
It seems that in Australia, a far greater sin than athletic underachievement is taking yourself too seriously.
"When she's trying to halt a musical, when she's trying to trademark something like a kangaroo hop, that's about her," Aventi says.
"I think if she stood for something a little bit bigger – maybe resilience, strength, owning your own truth – that would have given a different centre of gravity to the story.
"I know she's been through a lot, but a little bit more vulnerability might have helped people warm to her a bit more.
"I feel really uncomfortable saying that. It's like Lindy Chamberlain all over again – why should we expect someone to be vulnerable? But vulnerability is something that connects and opens people up."
Now the dust has settled on Raygun's cultural moment, what have we learned?
That Australians don't like people who take themselves too seriously? That we like our athletes to win? That we're suspicious of academics? That the internet expects women to behave in a certain way and reacts violently when they don't?
Or was it just, as Shakespeare once wrote, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?"
In the end, Broadbridge got to keep her musical, albeit with the lead's name changed to Spraygun and the title changed to Breaking: The Musical.
And Gunn has her trademarked moves and a great story to tell someday.
And after their crash course in public relations, she and her team might get the marketing right when she does.
Rachael Gunn declined to be interviewed for this story.
Watch Australian Story's Break It Down, 8:00pm, on ABCTV and ABC iview.
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