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.
“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.”
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.
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.