Meet the 36-year-old Australian university professor who made breakdance shine at the Paris Olympics (and didn’t score a single point)

PARIS — One by one, the breakers emerged, dressed in baggy pants and bandanas, crop tops and durags, tracksuits and backwards baseball caps, oversized T-shirts and classic hip-hop outfits.

And then there was Rachael Gunn, Raygun B-girl, dressed in a standard Australian Olympic uniform, shirt tucked in like a 36-year-old university professor – because she is one.

“I didn’t get the memo,” Gunn told Yahoo Sports, “that we weren’t going to represent our country. What’s going on?”

She said this, and much else, with a wry smile. She was fully aware that she looked, sounded and was out of place. In a field full of world champions and teenagers with braces, she was an outlier, a former ballroom dancer with a PhD in cultural studies and a day job at Macquarie University in Sydney.

“Look, I came to the event expecting not to get a vote,” she said.

And she didn’t, losing her three round-robin battles 18-0, 18-0, 18-0 as the women’s breakdancing competition began Friday.

Instead, she relied on her “unique style” — which many viewers interpreted, perhaps rightly, as a bit.

She took off her standard green Australian baseball cap. She bounded up to the stage, pumping her fist in the air. She flexed her muscles and wiped the bottom of her white granny sneakers. She glided across the floor with the grace of a gym teacher. At one point, she flopped like a fish.

“Look, everyone has a different style of break,” she said.

So she did something akin to a crab walk. She did a not-quite-vertical handstand. She did some basic downrock moves, but she didn’t have anything like the powerful acrobatic moves of her competitors.

“My style is not really suited to these kinds of events,” she said. “You can see the dynamics, a lot of really fast footwork, powerful movements, blocking and things like that.”

But she was really good for a woman who only started breakdancing at 20, thanks to her boyfriend at the time, now her husband. Pretty good for an Australian, not exactly a hip-hop icon. She qualified because she was the best in Oceania.

“I’ve never played on a stage this big,” she said. “We don’t have events this big in Australia.”

And she’s far from a full-time gymnast, as some other Olympic athletes are. She spends most of her time lecturing and researching dance, gender politics and the “dynamics between theoretical and practical methodologies,” according to her biography on the Olympics website.

“In 2023, many of my students didn’t believe me when I told them I was training to qualify for the Olympics, and were shocked when they checked on Google and saw that I had qualified,” Gunn told CNBC.

So she was radiant after six rounds of break, even after leaving the competition without a vote.

“It was incredible. What an incredible experience,” she told Yahoo Sports outside the La Concorde venue. “What a stage, what an arena, what a crowd. The music was amazing. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m so grateful for this opportunity.’”