Rachael “Raygun” Gunn has now watched her full Paris 2024 Olympic breakdancing routine and says the performance that made her a global viral sensation was “not as bad as I thought!” The Australian athlete said she had previously only seen “little bits and pieces” of the routine before finally sitting through it this week.
The reassessment lands after a year in which Gunn’s Olympic debut drew mockery online and left her feeling “kind of sick in the stomach” with “this sense of dread.” She was Australia’s first Olympic breakdancer, but the judges gave her no points at the 2024 Paris Olympics, turning a single routine into one of the most discussed moments of the Games.
Gunn said that distance has changed how she sees Paris now. “Paris is now just a part of my story,” she said, adding that she is focused on “radical acceptance of everything that’s happened and just one foot in front of the other, just trying to move ahead.” That shift matters because the performance was never just a sporting moment; it became a public test of how quickly an athlete can be turned into a joke, then asked to live with it.
But Gunn’s view of the backlash has also hardened into a broader critique of the internet itself. “I do think that we put in a little bit too much credence in online reactions,” she said. “But online is not the real world.” She said she is “absolutely rubbished online” but gets “a very, very different response in person,” a split that captures the gap between viral ridicule and face-to-face reactions.
That gap is part of why the story has not faded. Gunn has said female athletes are under more scrutiny over performance, clothing and body shape, and she has suggested that ending up online can be reframed as proof that someone has done something interesting. The next chapter is a Netflix documentary, Untold: Raygun: Breaking Badly, which is set to revisit the Paris moment and Gunn’s reaction to what followed.
