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Australia's number one ranked female breakdancer Rachael 'Bgirl Raygun' Gunn poses during a portrait session on December 09, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. This week the International Olympic Committee announced that Breakdancing will be added to the program at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

‘I’m still going to dance’: Sorry, haters, Olympic breakdancing meme queen Raygun isn’t going anywhere

An icon.

The internet’s attention span may be egregiously short, but we simply cannot forget Rachael Gunn (stage name Raygun), the woman who inspired the world with her breakdancing skills over the summer at the Paris Olympics. She’s back in the news cycle, now, after implying that she was retiring, but it may not be that serious.

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“I still break, but I don’t compete. I’m not gonna compete anymore,” the Olympian told Australia’s Today FM on Tuesday, fueling reports that she was retiring as a result of the ridicule she faced over her performance during the inaugural breakdancing event at the 2024 Olympic Games. Gunn confessed that the “level of scrutiny” and the prospect of her performances being filmed and uploaded online would ruin the experience of competing. “I still dance, and I still break. But, you know, that’s like, in my living room with my partner.”

Australian Olympic breaking athlete Rachael 'Raygun' Gunn poses during a portrait session in the Sydney central business district on April 17, 2024 in Sydney, Australia. Gunn is representing Australia as a B-Girl after qualifying for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games in Women's Breaking on it's Olympic debut.
Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

Two days later, the B-girl joined the television panel program The Project to clarify her statements. “Raygun’s not retiring,” she reassured, explaining that the only things that she is leaving in the past are “elite competitions and the Olympics,” before reminding those listening that the upcoming Los Angeles Games will no longer include breakdancing in its sports roster, anyway.

So, fret not, Raygun-heads, the star has confirmed she is “still going to dance,” even if only at community jams. “It’s different in breaking culture,” she said. Jam sessions were the starting point of breakdancing as a sport and they’re still the beating heart of its culture now. Per Campus Times, a jam blends “competition, performance, and ritual,” and fosters a much more collaborative environment than dance battles where even the audience can get involved. As a result, these sessions probably provide a much more welcoming scenario for Gunn, who says her life never returned to normal after Paris.

B-Girl Raygun of Team Australia competes during the B-Girls Round Robin - Group B on day fourteen of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at Place de la Concorde on August 09, 2024 in Paris, France.
Photo by Elsa/Getty Images

Readers will recall that the dancer did not make it past the first round (known as the round-robin stage) of the breaking event at the 2024 Summer Olympics, receiving zero points in all three battles against American, French, and Lithuanian competitors. Her moves, including a country-appropriate kangaroo hop and floor-wiping wriggling, quickly blew up on the internet, “meme’d” and recreated to death in the span of just a few days. Then came the conspiracy theories that accused the 37-year-old of cheating her way to the Olympic stage by having her husband judge the Oceania Breaking Championships which served as the Olympic qualifiers.

Gunn called the hate “devastating” in an Instagram video. But at least “the energy in person is always very different from the energy online,” she told The Project about interacting with people who now recognize her on the street. “In person, people have been lovely, it’s been really amazing.”

There you have it, folks! Raygun may not be competing anymore, but she is still going to be an active participant in the breakdancing world, because no matter how hard people tried to tear her down online, even starting a Charge.org petition calling for an investigation, Gunn is still the woman who made it to the Olympics doing the thing she loves most. Her haters, meanwhile, will always be just mean people on the internet.


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Author
Image of Francisca Tinoco
Francisca Tinoco
Francisca is a pop culture enthusiast and film expert. Her Bachelor's Degree in Communication Sciences from Nova University in Portugal and Master's Degree in Film Studies from Oxford Brookes University in the UK have allowed her to combine her love for writing with her love for the movies. She has been a freelance writer and content creator for five years, working in both the English and Portuguese languages for various platforms, including WGTC.