Viral Olympic B-girl Raygun says she is done with competitive breakdancing
Breakdancing won’t be an Olympic sport in 2028. And even if it were, the woman who is arguably the world’s most famous B-girl would not participate.
Rachael Gunn, the Australian breakdancer better known as Raygun, said this week she will no longer take part in elite competitions after being widely mocked for her unorthodox routines at the Paris Games this year.
During an appearance on Australia radio’s “The Jimmy & Nath Show” on Tuesday, Gunn was asked if she’d ever want to compete in the Olympics again.
“No,” she laughed. “Noooo! No!”
The 37-year-old university lecturer said that her competitive breakdancing days are over.
“I still break, but I don’t compete,” she said. “I’m not gonna compete anymore. No. No.”
Rachael Gunn, a.k.a. Raygun, says she’s sorry for the backlash Australia’s breakdancing community has received after her mocked performance at the Paris Olympics.
That wasn’t the plan going into the Olympics, Gunn said. She represented her country at the World Breaking Championships from 2021 to. 2023 and qualified for the Paris Games by winning the Oceania Breaking Championships in October 2023.
In Paris, however, Gunn was outscored by her opponents 54-0 and did not advance past the first round. Her unconventional dance moves, particularly one in which she mimicked a kangaroo, went viral as Gunn became a punchline for the likes of late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon and many others.
More than 57,000 people signed a change.org petition calling for an investigation into the selection process that allowed Gunn into the competition. The website eventually took the petition down after it “was flagged for misinformation and was reviewed according to our Community Guidelines,” the site said in a statement.
In September, Gunn apologized to Australia’s breakdancing community for the backlash it received following her performance.
American B-girls didn’t advance to the medal round of the first Olympic breaking competition, but they were proud to see their art in the spotlight.
“Yeah, I was going to keep competing [after the Olympics] for sure,” Gunn said during her radio appearance this week, “but that seems [like a] really difficult thing for me to do now, to approach a battle. I mean, I still dance and I still break. But, you know, that’s like in my living room with my partner.”
She added: “I think the level of scrutiny that’s gonna be there and the people will be filming it and it’ll go online, and it’s just not gonna mean the same thing. It’s not going to be the same experience because of everything that’s at stake.”
On Thursday, Gunn appeared on the Australian talk show “The Project” to clarify that she was not retiring from the sport, as some news outlets had reported.
“Not retired,” she said. “Never said the word ‘retire.’”
Instead, Gunn said she would not be taking part in “elite competitions and the Olympics” anymore.
“I’m still gonna dance,” she said. “I’m still gonna go to community jams. I’m still probably gonna get down and enter a community jam and things like that.”
Go beyond the scoreboard
Get the latest on L.A.'s teams in the daily Sports Report newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
