I was once team Raygun. After her heavy-handed legal threats, no more

From where I sat, high in the rickety bleachers of the Olympic breaking stadium in Paris on that hot August day, Rachael Gunn’s performance didn’t look that bad.

Sure, she resembled a 1980s PE teacher when she walked out in her Australian team tracksuit. Yes, the writhing was cringeworthy. I was too far away to see the contortions of her face, or the finer points of the helicopter/sprinkler/changing the doona moves that became the biggest story of the Games. But nerves do strange things to people, even at the Olympics. I thought she’d be eliminated and that would be the end of it. So did she.

Another one of Raygun’s signature moves.Credit: Getty Images

But when journalists from across the world gathered around her in the media pen afterwards, asking polite but pointed questions, I watched Gunn’s smile tighten as she realised they were laughing at her. At that moment, she rallied.

She answered questions gracefully, with a quiver in her voice and a startled look in her eye. Over the next few weeks, as vicious, unfounded and misogynistic allegations flew at her and the global humiliation intensified, I was on team Raygun.

My sympathy for the awkward academic began to curdle into cynicism as her commercial campaign took off back home, but the latest effort from brand Raygun, in which Gunn’s lawyers shut down a Sydney comedian’s tribute show, Raygun the Musical, and demanded $10,000 in legal fees from the venue, was the last straw. To put that amount in perspective, the venue had raised $500 from presales for the show they were donating to women’s charity.

A dancer from a sub-culture defined by its freedom, rebellion and creative generosity was now trying to control other artists. It suggests grasping rather than grace.

B-Girl Raygun made her mark in Paris. Now her controversial moves could help the breakdancer build a business empire.Credit: Photo composite

In the lead-up to Paris, Gunn was a media curiosity. The sport formerly known as breakdancing, born in the Bronx 50 years ago and with a brief, much-mocked moment in the cultural mainstream during the 1980s, was making its Olympic debut. Australia would be represented in the women’s event by Gunn, an articulate, earnest academic who had a PhD in the cultural politics of her own sport.

She seized the opportunity to explain breaking to the world: how the community was struggling to shrug off its reputation as “this stale joke from the 80s”, how it had been kept alive in Australia by marginalised, migrant communities in Sydney’s west, and how she hoped Olympic exposure would lead to more respect.

She explained that some of the world’s top breakers didn’t want their art form to become an Olympic sport, but they co-operated for fear of another ’80s-style episode, when “the narrative kind of got carried away … and a lot of the culture and the history was lost”.

Back then, breaking was hijacked by Flashdance and Electric Boogaloo. Since that hot August afternoon in Paris, it appears to have been hijacked by Raygun. Breaking is once again a stale mainstream joke, not only because of Gunn’s bizarre Olympic performance, but because of her relentless push to monetise it.

There’s no guide to navigating oneself out of a global pile-on. Perhaps Gunn figured she couldn’t erase her global infamy, so she might as well make a buck from it. It’s difficult to blame her, but the protracted pause between the Olympics and her reappearance, and then the intensity of her publicity campaign since – advertising deals with websites, rumoured appearances on reality television shows, her attempt to trademark her name and signature kangaroo pose (which she insists is a reference to the Olympic boxing kangaroo, rather than traditional Indigenous dance) – suggests she missed the joke, then began laughing too loud, too late.

Rachael Gunn goes by the street name B-Girl Raygun.Credit: Courtesy of The Iconic

The shutting-down of the comedian’s show, and now the financial demands on the comedy club’s owner (Gunn’s lawyers refused to compromise by taking the $500 raised in ticket sales) seem merciless as well as humourless. “They were ... worried that I was damaging her brand,” said comedian Stephanie Broadbridge, whose musical had been sympathetic to Gunn.

Gunn’s legal letter goes further – it demands “absolute undertakings” they will never use her famously weird choreography. This is a highly unusual request; athletes invent moves all the time. If Dick Fosbury had banned others from copying his back-first high jump, people would still be scissor-kicking over the bar. There are five gymnastics moves named after American Simone Biles; so far, she hasn’t banned her competitors from using any of them.

I don’t buy the argument Gunn deliberately mocked her own sport at the Olympics, or she cheated the qualification system, or she was guilty of cultural appropriation. But if her reputation has suffered further since she got home, it’s her own doing. Her attempt at controlling her image is not only unsportsmanlike; it’s against everything Gunn’s own breaking culture is supposed to be about.

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