How did B-Girl Rachael Gunn get to the Olympics?

When breaker Rachael Gunn – aka Raygun – was eliminated from the Paris Olympics, the shockwaves hit a small hip-hop scene halfway around the world.

In a Sydney warehouse converted into a community centre, participants warm up with ab exercises that would make a Pilates instructor cry, before hitting the dance floor with acrobatic moves so complex they’re hard to tell apart.

It’s one of the biggest events of the year – a qualifier for the Red Bull BC One World Finals – and the past week has weighed heavily.

A few people glance nervously at the few cameras lined up along the dance circle, their minds no doubt turning to images of Gunn that have set the Internet ablaze.

“I feel like it’s taken our Australian scene into the dark ages,” Australian hip-hop pioneer Spice told the BBC.

Gunn, a 36-year-old college professor, lost all three of her Olympic battles in viral fashion, his green and gold tracksuit and his unorthodox routine – which included the sprinkler and kangaroo-inspired jumps – generating waves of memes and abuse.

The fallout has divided and disappointed the Australian breakdancing community.

“It’s made a mockery of the Australian scene and I think that’s why a lot of us are suffering,” Spice says.

Many rushed to defend Raygun against the onslaught.

Others are willing to admit there are unanswered questions about his qualification and performance, but say the global harassment has undermined any attempt to fairly analyse what happened in Paris.

Gunn has always been a dancer – albeit in jazz, tap and ballroom first – but it was her husband and coach Samuel Free who introduced her to the world of breakdancing at the age of 20.

She says it took her years to find her place in a male-dominated environment.

“There were times when I was going to the toilet crying because I was so embarrassed by how bad I was at the game,” she told Guardian Australia ahead of the Olympics.

But ultimately, Gunn became the face of breaking in Australia – a leading B-girl and an academic with a PhD in the cultural politics of sport.

And at an Olympic qualifying event in Sydney last October, where 15 women from across Oceania competed, Raygun emerged triumphant and officially booked her ticket to Paris.

Like Gunn, breakdancing was perhaps a surprising candidate for the Olympics. Born in the cultural melting pot of the Bronx in the 1970s, the street dance quickly became a global phenomenon.

And in recent years, alongside urban sports like skateboarding and freestyle BMX, it has caught the attention of Olympic officials eager to attract a new, younger audience.

Some have argued that the sport does not deserve the attention of the Olympics, while others have insisted that a competition like this cannot capture the essence of breaking and would only further separate the art form from the street culture from which it emerged.

All eyes were on the event in Paris to see if the Olympic Committee’s gamble would pay off.

By the time the final B-girl battle at the Olympics ended, it was clear that breaking had indeed captured the world’s attention—or, more accurately, that Raygun had.

Rumors and criticism of his performance spread like wildfire, especially on the Internet. Gunn received a torrent of violent messages.

An anonymous petition calling on Gunn to apologise has been signed by 50,000 people.

She has been accused – without evidence – of manipulating her access to the world’s biggest stage to the detriment of other emerging talents in the Australian hip-hop scene.

Some people have shared a conspiracy that she created the governing body that ran the Oceania qualifiers, and a lie that her husband – who is also a prominent member of the breakdancing community and a qualified judge – was part of the panel that selected her.

Australian Fact-Checking Organisations and AUSBreaking, the national breaking organization, quickly tried to correct the record, but that didn’t stop the deluge.

There were also those who said she was making fun of hip-hop culture.

“It just seemed like someone was playing with culture and didn’t know how culturally important it was,” Malik Dixon told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In a series of statements, AUSBreaking stressed that the judges were “trained to the highest standards of impartiality” and that none of the nine-person Oceania qualifying panel were Australian.

And while AUSBreaking has had numerous “interactions” with Raygun since its conception in 2019, at no point has it held a leadership position or been involved in “any decision-making regarding events, funding, strategy, judging, or athlete selection.”

Taking to Instagram to slam all the “wild theories”, Te Hiiritanga Wepiha – a New Zealand judge on the Oceania qualifying panel – said Raygun had won fair and square.

“We judges all talked about how she was going to get crushed, absolutely crushed (at the Olympics)… She knew it was going to be tough, so that’s actually brave of her,” Wepiha – also known as Rush – said during a livestream

Some of the country’s most decorated athletes and top Olympic officials have also spoken out for Gunn.

“The petition has stirred up public hatred without any factual basis. It is appalling,” Matt Carroll of the Australian Olympic Committee said in a statement.

Gunn herself had previously said that she would “never” be able to beat her powerful competitors, and so she “wanted to move differently, to be artistic and creative.”

In a video posted to social media in broad daylight, Gunn added that she took the competition “very seriously.”

“I worked hard to prepare for the Olympics and gave it my all. I really did.”

She simply tried to “spark joy,” she explained. “I didn’t know it would open the door to so much hate, which has been frankly devastating.”

Some in the Australian hip-hop community admit that the reaction to Raygun’s routine initially elicited “a little chuckle” – but that quickly escalated.

Everyone unequivocally condemned the sheer volume of abuse, ridicule and misinformation that has targeted Raygun and the wider Australian B-girl community.

But beyond that, feelings are somewhat mixed.

Many B-girls say Raygun’s performance does not reflect the Australian standard.

“When I first saw him, I was so embarrassed,” says Spice, who retired from breakdancing years ago.

On any other stage, Raygun would have been encouraged and supported for “taking a chance,” Spice says, but people who represent the country have to be of a certain standard.

“It’s the Olympics, for God’s sake!”

“In hip-hop, there’s this idea that you either go up or you go down… You have to know your place.”

However, she stresses that “the harassment is simply disgusting.”

The impact of the controversy on local Australian b-girls has been “devastating”, B-girl Tinylocks.

“We have a right to be angry,” she told the BBC.

She, like others the BBC spoke to, said they did not want their full names published because of the scale of the abuse circulating.

B-girls’ videos are being trolled, their private messages are being flooded with insults and violent threats. Young dancers are being bullied at school and many no longer feel safe practicing in public.

Tinylocks – who fought Raygun herself – thinks Gunn just had a terrible day and questions his routine choices.

“We know you are capable of more… Were you prepared for success?”

According to Wepiha, the Oceania panel judge also known as Rush, Gunn’s qualifying victory reflects the size of Australia’s “small” breakdancing scene, and the even smaller public and government support for it.

“I mean, we had to bring people out of retirement to supplement the workforce,” Rush said.

“That’s how small the stage is.”

Others say there were rules that could have made a small talent pool even smaller – such as requiring potential qualifiers to be members of AUSBreaking and have a valid passport, in line with rules set by the World Dance Sport Federation.

AUSBreaking did not respond to questions from the BBC about Raygun’s selection, the financial support it receives or how it seeks out the country’s best talent.

But Steve Gow, the group’s secretary and long-time b-boy Stevie G, tells the BBC that Australia’s size and isolation are hampering the scene’s growth and development.

Being so far removed from other, larger hip-hop communities abroad can make it difficult – both in terms of time and money required – to learn from them.

“It can be very insular,” he says.

As if to prove it, he regularly stops to greet almost everyone who enters the Red Bull competition he judges.

He insists there is still a high quality of breaks in Australia.

Ultimately, the community is deeply hurt by the world’s reaction.

They feel that the breakup phenomenon is not really understood and that people have gotten into it without knowledge or context.

“It’s a big disappointment because they’re not talking about the winners… they’re all talking about Raygun memes, and they don’t even see his full set,” Samson Smith, a member of hip-hop group Justice Crew and a breaker for more than two decades, told Network 10.

But many hope that a glimmer of hope may finally appear.

“It might actually attract enough attention to get resources,” Rush said.

“Ultimately, Australia has the most famous Olympian of 2024 and she could well save the scene here.”