Raygun, the Olympics and a world turned upside down: ‘I brought shame on the country’

In the lead-up to the 2024 Olympic Games, Australian breakdancer Raygun spoke to her therapist about her overwhelming concerns that she was not good enough to compete.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” her therapist questioned.

“The whole world could laugh at me?” Raygun replied.

“Do you think that’s reasonable?” the therapist asked back.

Raygun, real name Rachael Gunn, laughs as she recounts this exchange a few years later in Raygun: Breaking Badly, the latest instalment in Netflix’s Untold series of sports documentaries. It tells the story of Raygun’s journey from art student to university lecturer/B-girl and then, quite unexpectedly, an Olympian after breakdancing was introduced for the 2024 Summer Games.

It reveals how she qualified (spoiler: legitimately) and the insecurities and imposter syndrome that manifested in a panic attack when she arrived in the Olympic village, aged 36, surrounded by finely tuned athletes in matching tracksuits. “It immediately felt like I was in that movie, Inception,” she recalls in the documentary. “This was so totally foreign to anything I’d ever been in.”

We hear from other female “breakers”, Tiny Locks and Flix, who provide painfully honest opinions on Raygun’s talents. She has called “sloppy” and, later, accused of giving an Olympic performance that was “embarrassing” and “offensive” to the breaking community as a whole.

The insight into what happened after she performed on one of sport’s grandest stages is the most revealing part of the documentary. After losing her first two battles 9-0, 9-0, she’d gone into her final attempt, deciding to let her originality shine through. Her husband and coach, Sammy Free, speaks proudly about being “struck by the beauty of her performance. It was the essence of creativity”.

After walking off with zero points once again, but proud of reaching the Olympic stage and relieved that the ordeal was finally over, she soon realises the true test was just beginning. She has become one of the most ridiculed athletes the world has ever seen. Or at least, the most ridiculed since the advent of social media opened up a world where almost everyone on the planet gets the chance to share their opinion.

She recalls the realisation that she had become a meme, featured on every social media platform from Instagram to Twitter and even LinkedIn. She describes it as a “growing monster” whose mood swiftly turned from good-humoured to dark and abusive.

Conspiracy theories emerged about how she qualified for the Games, accusing Sammy of rigging the qualification competition, saying he was a judge and had set up the governing body for Australian breaking. She’s labelled a “cheater” who was never deserving of the Olympic spotlight.

She shares an online video message asking the press to stop harassing her family and friends and the Australian breaking community. But it only seems to make things worse.

The pair hide away in Europe, Raygun plunged into a pit of anxiety, fuelled by the feeling that life as she knew it was over. “I was cringe, I brought shame and embarrassment on the country,” she says. “That was rough.”

She talks of the need for medication so she can “not feel like this every day”, and we see the impact the ordeal has on Sammy, who describes it as “a massive trauma”, and her parents, who are in tears when she finally allows them to speak to her over the phone.

“Why you?” asks her dad, visibly still distressed as he remembers the conversation. “Out of all the people there, why you?”

Her pathway out of the darkness comes from a surprise source (though perhaps one in keeping with her surreal journey), when English business magnate Sir Richard Branson tracks her down, having been wowed by her determination to put her true self out for the world to see, and dismayed by the vitriol that had followed. He wants to change the narrative that has been built around her:

“The world needs to be made up of original thinkers,” he tells the documentary. “In my opinion, she did something extraordinary — she stood out from the crowd.”

Branson invites her and Sammy on a cruise, where he hails her as a hero in front of cheering crowds and reinstates some of the confidence and pride that have taken such a beating. Raygun calls it a “lifeline”.

The documentary starts and ends in Taiwan, 18 months on from the Paris Olympics, where Raygun is back breaking in front of a crowd for the first time since 2024. The memories and emotions of that time are still fresh. We see her dissolve into tears as she prepares to go on stage, a “flash of Paris” invading her mind at the last moment.

Her goal, she says, is just to dance in front of people and show them that what happened hasn’t defeated her. One thing she knows is that she will never stop dancing.

There’s an uplifting feel to the end of the film as we hear how the pendulum of public opinion has swung back in her favour. There are still memes about her, but they’re in good humour. On Halloween, there are endless pictures and videos of people dressed up as her. She shows a folder she has created on her phone called “Positives”, containing memes and messages that make her laugh.

Over time, she and Sammy have realised that a greater portion of the reaction was more positive than they had realised. It was just drowned out by the negativity, which is always amplified far more.

All of which is a reflection of the time in which we are living, where the instant, overwhelming response from traditional and social media can carry incredible weight, and the mood can swing from laudatory to mockery at a stroke. In the end, sometimes, there is sympathy for the damage caused and a realisation that the initial response was perhaps disproportionate. But only if you’re lucky.

Maybe Raygun had a bit of luck. Maybe the rest of us did, in witnessing the bravery of a woman putting her true self on the world’s grandest sporting stage — even if she didn’t fit the mould of what was expected.