‘I feel like every time I put myself out there, it’s a bit of a power move’: Raygun as you’ve never seen her before
After her controversial turn at the Paris Olympics, Rachael Gunn – AKA Raygun – shows off a new look, as she delivers a message to her critics – and reveals her next power move.
Stellar
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There is a folder on the phone of Rachael “Raygun” Gunn where she stores a growing collection of happy, positive images and funny memes that she says have helped to keep her sane over the past few difficult months.
Their exact contents might surprise you.
“Can you believe that?” Gunn asks Stellar, laughing as she holds up her phone to the screen during our video interview.
In the frame is an image of Gunn lying down in her infamous Australian Olympic Team tracksuit, legs waving back and forth in their position on the rear windscreen wiper of a Jeep. “How good is that? Love that. I’m going to get that for my car,” she adds.
She holds up another meme depicting a grid of several of her most animated faces from her three Olympic breaking battles, ranked from one to seven. It reads: “On a scale of Raygun moves, how is your mental health today?”
Another features Gunn in her signature kangaroo hop pose, leaning back with curled hands, photoshopped on the zebra crossing of The Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road album cover.
“I’ve got a digital pool room of all the best ones,” she reveals, referencing the “straight to the pool room” line from the classic 1997 Australian film The Castle.
“My friends were all sending them to me and I loved it. I loved the people laughing with me because, yeah, I was doing some wacky stuff. I know that.”
Just like the millions of people around the world who followed her highly scrutinised performances in Paris, Gunn is laughing.
On the bad days – and sometimes on the good ones – she’ll open the folder as a reminder that despite the public abuse directed towards her since her swift exit from the Games, there was also joy.
Since making history in August as the first Australian woman to compete in breaking during its Olympic debut as a medal sport in Paris – where Gunn, as B-girl Raygun, scored zero votes in all three breaking battles and failed to advance past the round-robin stage – she has been labelled everything from a national hero to a national disgrace.
At worst, the 37-year-old was called on to apologise publicly to all Australians for her performance, became the subject of internet mocking and hate campaigns, was targeted in conspiracy theories about her inclusion on the team, had her integrity questioned, and was stalked by paparazzi.
In some of the better moments, she was called “the best thing that’s happened in the Olympics” by British singer Adele during her concert in Germany, praised by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for having a crack “in the Australian tradition of people having a go”, embraced by the Australian Olympic Team who rallied around her during the closing ceremony, invited by Sir Richard Branson on board one of his cruise ships to teach him how to break and pictured out for lunch with pop icon Boy George.
Understandably, Gunn is still making sense of what’s happened.
It would be easy to dismiss the past two months as a whirlwind, but much like her moves, her world has been turned upside-down and spun around on its head in a battle of a very different kind.
“It’s been so hard to process,” she says of the media attention.
“My whole world has changed. My identity has changed. My relationships have changed, for better or for worse. It’s in times like these that you find out who your real friends are, unfortunately. And because things are still changing, it’s just impossible to wrap your head around. It’s hard to predict what it’s going to be like when I leave the house.
“It’s still a process because I’m having to prioritise my own health,” she adds. “I speak to my family when I can, but it’s hard for me to know the toll it’s taken on them because I think that will take a toll on me.”
Gunn is careful with what she puts on the record about the bad days, preferring to focus on the positive, wider outcomes of her experience. But she concedes that the anxiety “has been really bad”, escalating to a point where she needed someone to be with her at all times just to walk out her front door and revealing that she no longer wears a baseball cap in public because it only makes her more recognisable.
“People really have tried to shame me,” she says.
“This is a process that I’m working through, trying to resist that shame. I’m working through mental health stuff, seeing my psychologist, doing exercise when I don’t feel like it, doing breathing exercises. [My mental health] is now something that I have to look after – it’s being exhausted. It’s definitely taken a toll.”
A university lecturer who holds a PhD in cultural studies with a focus on the cultural politics of breaking, Gunn acknowledges that she isn’t your typical B-girl.
Despite false allegations that her husband and coach, Samuel Free, judged her qualification trial to score her a spot on the Olympic team – speculation she says was deeply hurtful – she remains an active member of the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF) and her credentials are legitimate.
“I was the top-ranked Australian B-girl in 2020 and 2022 and 2023,” she explains.
“I think that’s been a huge part of maybe some of the shock [about me] – that I could be a breaker and I could be an academic, because [the public] have these very entrenched views of one or the other.”
Gunn believes there’s now a wider conversation to be had not just about her performance, but more specifically about gender, age and where society thinks a woman in her mid-to-late 30s belongs.
The heart of the negativity towards her, she suggests, comes from a place far deeper than the shallow pool of social media. “I’m a confident woman who is 37, without kids, with a career, having fun,” Gunn tells Stellar.
“Our culture is very obsessed with age. I think it’s been a real sticking point for a lot of people: me essentially not knowing my place, what I should be doing with my time at this age; [in their view] it’s certainly not participating in that environment, even though I wasn’t the oldest there,” she adds, nodding to the fact that Japanese B-girl quarter-finalist Ayumi Fukushima turned 41 before the Paris Games.
“I had a few people tell me on Facebook and on Instagram what I should be doing … that I should be picking the kids up from school.”
In the same year that Australia broke its record for Olympic gold medals, culminating in the country’s most successful Games – with female athletes accounting for 61.6 per cent of our 86 medallists, and 13 of our 18 gold medals – Gunn says the criticism levelled at her was the product of an unfair double standard that exists for women.
“I saw a great meme that was like, ‘The world is hard on silly women’, with a photo of me. Women aren’t allowed to be silly,” she points out. “But I think if I was a man, I would have very quickly been given the larrikin title and people would have rallied behind me a lot more.”
She adds that the Paris Olympic Games showcased “the best and the worst for gender equality. We had gender equity, which is huge. Absolutely huge. The Australian female Olympians did amazing in the medal tally, women’s sport reached new heights.
But at the same time, you know, there were awful reactions to the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif [the female gold medallist who secured victory under a cloud of misinformation about her gender] and awful reactions to me. So it’s like two steps forward, one-and- a-half steps back.”
Knowing she was never going to outdo the other female competitors on athleticism alone (Olympic breaking focused on four key components of dance: “top rocks”, “down rocks”, “freezes” and “power moves”), Gunn leant into creativity, heavily borrowing from Australian cultural influences for her moves such as the widely panned kangaroo, snake and sprinkler.
That some on the internet considered the moves “cringe” was one thing; an even bigger crime was that she seemed to be having fun while doing them.
“I think that was an interesting reaction, that people thought because I looked like I was enjoying myself, I didn’t take it seriously, that I was overly confident that I didn’t know my level,” Gunn says of that criticism.
“Of course I knew my level. I did want to go out there and show people that it was OK to be yourself in spite of the world watching, in spite of having to come up against people that are really amazing dancers – younger [and with] different approaches … to just do what feels right for you.”
Failing to catch a break, Gunn again made headlines in September when she was ranked the world’s number-one female breaker thanks to the 1000 WDSF points she earnt after winning the 2023 Oceania Continental Championships in October of that year. (With the rankings adjusted since the Olympic competition cycle, Gunn now sits in 17th place.) “It’s hilarious!” she says of her brief tenure at the top, again trying to find the humour in it.
“I did, like, ‘the worst out of any athlete, in any Olympic Games ever,’” she adds, nodding sarcastically to her critics. “And here I am, world number-one.”
Since returning home early last month, Gunn has deliberately kept a low profile, shunning many media appearances, speaker invitations and reality TV gigs – “the fact that I’ve been used to promote some reality TV series when I’m not going to be on them, I mean that’s crazy” – for time spent catching up on reading and “honestly, doing a big spring clean”.
She says the pressure to commodify her notoriety has been overwhelming, so she now has a manager on board, one who she reveals has helped her prioritise her mental health.
“There was so much hate and emotion that I needed to wait for everyone to calm down a bit,” Gunn says.
“I’ve got a few new projects that I’m working on right now that I’m really excited about [that are] centred around self-expression and joyfulness. You should be hearing more about them in the next few months.”
Being an advocate for breaking also remains a priority for Gunn, despite the announcement prior to the Paris Olympics that the sport wouldn’t be included in the Los Angeles 2028 Games.
“I hope that the interest in breaking doesn’t start, and end, with me,” she says, adding that she hopes those sharing Raygun memes will learn to humanise the woman at the centre of them: “People need to remember that this is a person who has worked hard and has dreams and aspirations. I trained really, really hard.”
Having endured the worst of what internet infamy has to offer, Gunn also doesn’t want her experience to stand for nothing. She hopes it will spark genuine, cross-generational discussions about shame and success, adding that she will one day write about her experience.
“We need to not be so quick to police others,” she says. “We say we want our kids to work hard, we want them to be different, we think they’re special. But then as soon as someone does anything different … we come down on them like a tonne of bricks. And in the same breath, [we say] ‘Go out there and do your best.’ But your best is not good enough … Do we really only believe that your best is winning gold? This is a real moment for reflection and learning and growth.”
So with the sprinkler and kangaroo hop possibly retired from her repertoire, but certainly not the Zeitgeist – “the Raygun” looks poised to be one of the most popular costumes for Halloween this Thursday – Stellar wonders if Gunn has considered her next power move.
“I still don’t know what the future holds,” she replies.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done in trying to rebuild my image. I’ll just let people get to know me a bit more, because they just don’t.
“I feel like every time I put myself out there again, it’s a bit of a power move.
“I think the haters want me to be locked away in a room, ashamed and quiet. Every time I leave the house, go out for dinner, go to the shops or do a fashion shoot and pop my head back up, it’s saying, ‘No, you did not bring me down. You did not succeed. I still stand by what I did. It’s OK to be different. It’s OK to be yourself. You don’t have the power you think you do.’”
See the full shoot and interview with Raygun in the latest issue of Stellar, out on Sunday. For more from Stellar and the podcast, Something To Talk About, click here.
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