In October 2023, members of the World DanceSport Federation, or WDSF, discovered breaking, the sport they’d been making an attempt to make occur at the Olympics for years, wouldn’t be showing at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
In response, the group’s president, Shawn Tay, made a grand proclamation. “Ensuring the success of breaking’s Olympic debut at Paris 2024 is therefore on the forefront of the WDSF agenda,” he mentioned. “Our performance in Paris will define the future of dance sport within the Olympic Movement.”
Going into the video games, breaking had loads using on its shoulders. But nobody counted on Raygun — the newly notorious, 36-year-old, last-place Australian b-girl (as breakers are referred to as) whose performance on the Paris stage included weird floor-writhing, awkward freezes, and “original” strikes like kangaroo hops.
Raygun, actual title Rachael Gunn, immediately grew to become a viral sensation — notoriety that solely skyrocketed when the public discovered that Gunn, who gained none of her Olympics battles, really has a PhD specializing in breakdancing. Yes, actually. Gunn’s efficiency has not solely overshadowed the two precise breaking gold medalists, Japan’s Yuasa Ami and Canada’s Phil Wizard (plus 16-year-old Australian b-boy Jeff Dunne), it’s arguably grow to be the defining second of a Parisian Games marked by controversy and absurdity.
Gunn shocked the world once more in September when she was ranked the No. 1 breaker in the world, primarily based on the WDSF’s guidelines, which exclude Olympic occasions (together with qualifiers) from its evaluation.
Alongside widespread mockery of Gunn herself runs hypothesis that Gunn’s presence at the Games and at the high of the rankings needs to be some type of mistake, even corruption. How did Raygun wind up at the Olympics when, for instance, a few b-girls in Melbourne can serve these strikes?
To reply this query, we’ve to go on a little bit of a deep dive — so let’s (sorry) hop on in.
Reports Raygun manipulated her method into the Olympics couldn’t be farther from the reality…
For many years, the WDSF was dedicated to ballroom dancing. The affiliation began in the late ’90s with a give attention to successful a spot in the Olympics for ballroom dancing earlier than its subsequent pivot, round 2017, towards breaking. A quizzical backstory, sure — nevertheless it doesn’t make the group much less authentic. Te Hiiritanga Wepiha, a.ok.a. Rush, one in every of the judges in the ladies’s breaking remaining for the Oceania championship Gunn gained, posted a 90-minute livestreamed Instagram commentary on Tuesday in response to the controversy. He identified that the WDSF judging system, used in the Olympics and its breaking qualifiers, requires judges to be veterans in the breaking scene, each as opponents and as judges, in addition to to go a number of exams. “You have to be trained to be a judge,” he insisted.
This wasn’t Gunn’s first rodeo both. Prior to her Olympics look, she represented Australia at a number of World Championship competitions between 2021 and 2023. She judged Red Bull’s preeminent BC One breaking contest. She’s a longtime native champ.
Yet following Gunn’s look at the Olympics, a petition circulated claiming, with out sources, that Gunn and her husband, breaking coach Samuel Free, had manipulated the whole WDSF system in order to realize a spot at the Olympics. The petition falsely claimed Gunn had judged herself at the qualifying Oceania championship competitors — regardless of the judges’ listing for the occasion being available on the WDSF web site.
Other rumors additional alleged, once more with none obvious sourcing, that Gunn and her husband have been the masterminds behind the Australian Breaking Association, higher often called AUSBreaking — one other simply debunked declare. An AUSBreaking spokesperson additional confirmed to Vox in an e-mail that Gunn and her husband didn’t discovered the group. Gunn doesn’t look like instantly liable for managing, or funding, any breaking group, which seemingly additionally negates the petition’s declare that she denied journey funding to a marginalized dance crew from Australia’s Northern Territory.
…But that doesn’t imply it’s simple to grasp how she acquired there
The subtext of this criticism — that Gunn benefited from her whiteness — has advantage. Gunn was educated at one in every of Sydney’s most elite excessive faculties; she had the alternative to get a PhD in an obscure discipline, and the wealth to fund appearances at worldwide breaking competitions. Her white privilege in a dance scene rife with cultural appropriation makes her a straightforward goal for criticism. At the similar time, some have tried to argue she represents precisely the reverse — a “diversity hire” and Australian “wokeness” gone mistaken. “People have jumped on and used her as the new scapegoat to further their cause,” Wepiha noticed in his livestream.
“We never thought this would happen,” he advised me. “She’s getting torn down by a lot of people.”
Still, whereas the remainder of the world has put Gunn by the ringer since her Paris look, the precise breaking group appears to have rallied behind her.
“This is what happens when people outside of our dance want to control the narrative but have absolutely no expertise of technical knowledge on our dance, particularly in an Oceania context,” Dujon Cullingford, a veteran New Zealand breaker who attended the Oceania qualifiers, advised me. Cullingford wrote a Facebook submit arguing in opposition to the concept Gunn benefited from any issue in addition to a small expertise pool.
He emphasised that Oceania’s breaking group is tiny; one in every of Gunn’s personal articles positioned the variety of Australian breakers at round 400, complete, and Wepiha claimed the WDSF needed to “get people out of retirement in order to make up the numbers” of opponents. One of the major criticisms being bandied about considerations a public notion that the WDSF should not have been selling their occasions amongst “real” breaking scenes, however somewhat elitist communities like universities. But each Cullingford and Wepiha rejected this concept. “It’s very easy to know if there’s a jam on because the scene is tiny,” Wepiha mentioned.
“Down here, like other countries, we feel the squeeze of cost of living, and the breaking scene is small so it doesn’t produce a lot of people who have time to teach, lead crews, and mobilize the community in the same way,” Cullingford mentioned.
He famous that, additional diminishing the small expertise pool, many breakers selected to not compete in the Olympics qualifiers as a result of they didn’t wish to shell out the money wanted to journey to the competitors in Sydney final November. Additionally, many breakers merely had no curiosity in taking part because of the feeling that the efforts of the institution to rope breaking into the inflexible organizational construction of the Games was antithetical to road dance tradition. According to Wepiha, many dancers felt casual jams are extra expressive with much less strict judging — the type of breaking they wish to do, versus Olympic-level battling.
And then there was Raygun.
“She rocked up like everybody else,” Wepiha mentioned in his livestream relating to Gunn’s Oceania qualifier. “She won fair and square.” He identified that of the 10 judges at the occasion, just one was white and none have been Australian — a truth AUSBreaking additionally confirmed to Vox. “She won by majority decision, she battled like everyone else … it’s not that deep.”
You can decide for your self: in the Oceania Championships Raygun gained which secured her spot in the Olympics, she netted 51 general factors to 50 scored by her opponent Holy Molly (Molly Chapman). The essential remaining factors got here in this battle when the pair confronted off, with Raygun successful two of three rounds.
Since Gunn grew to become a viral sensation, many individuals have watched this battle and claimed that Molly was the clear winner, nevertheless it’s not so easy. For one factor, these judges had seen their general performances all through the competitors. If Molly was recycling strikes from earlier battles whereas Raygun stored issues distinctive, the judges most likely would have favored Raygun. Other components to maintain in thoughts embody issues like who was extra on beat, which dancer spent extra time on flooring strikes versus the transitional dance strikes referred to as toprock, whose actions have been stronger and extra fluid, whose strikes have been crisper and extra exact, and whose transitions have been extra fascinating.
Prior to this, each Chapman and Gunn competed in the World Championships in Belgium in September 2023. While neither of them certified then, out of 80 opponents, Gunn ranked sixty fourth — a full 15 slots forward of Chapman, who got here in subsequent to final. Not solely that, however due to one other regional first-place win that Raygun scored in October 2023, she is at the moment at the high of the world rankings because of the method the WDSF awards factors to non-qualifier competitions. That’s proper — Raygun, for a sizzling minute, is the No. 1 ranked breaker in the world, truthful and sq., earlier than the rankings are anticipated to reset in October.
All of this implies, regardless of the viral narrative that’s hooked up to her, it isn’t so simple as writing Gunn’s Olympics entrance off as a hilarious fluke or a mark of privileged corruption. Indeed, in accordance with Gunn, she meant to carry a mode of motion to the Paris Games that was much less about assembly expectations and extra about making an indelible affect.
“What I wanted to do was come out here and do something new and different and creative — that’s my strength, my creativity,” Gunn advised ESPN.
“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative because how many chances do you get … in a lifetime to do that.”
Score by rating, Raygun’s dancing isn’t really that dangerous. Really.
Gunn has been reflecting on what her model is for a while. In one in every of her educational articles on breaking, she argues, “Gender norms both articulate and limit my corporeal potential.” Gunn has additionally written about what she sees as the dance’s “normative construction” of masculinity.
In different phrases, the weirdness of Gunn’s dance … may be the entire level. Moreover, in extra casual breaking venues, it’s not even that bizarre. “What Raygun showcased at the Olympics is that breaking is a spectrum,” Wepiha mentioned in his livestream. He argued her model represents that extra casual, self-expressive facet of road dance. “She went up there and did what a lot of you complaining could never do. She was her authentic self.”
You could effectively ask: But don’t we’ve to carry Olympians to a better customary of excellence? Even if that excellence is solid from a masculinist development of athleticism and dance?
Well… can we? There’s each indication Gunn is at the moment the most well-known b-girl in the world, and whereas most individuals are laughing at her, not together with her, someplace in the large huge world of breaking, different b-girls could really feel impressed somewhat than shamed and mortified.
After all, even by the Olympic requirements, Gunn didn’t try this badly. If you have a look at the judges’ scoring, for instance, of her battle with US breaker Logistx, you’ll be able to see that whereas she nabbed zero rounds, a handful of judges had her beating Logistx in some subcategories, often originality. Meanwhile, whereas Logistx gained most classes, she usually solely gained by a number of proportion factors at greatest.
In different phrases, Gunn arguably held her personal at the Olympics beneath a once-in-a-lifetime quantity of strain, and he or she did it whereas making an attempt out her personal distinctive model.
Was it nice? No. Was it dangerous? Evidently not as dangerous as we thought.
The ambiguity leaves us with a multitude; many (although actually not all) of the individuals heaping criticism upon Gunn are individuals who barely knew what breaking was a fortnight in the past, whereas a lot of the individuals speeding to defend her are breaking veterans. In between are the individuals who simply wish to meme. The state of affairs has some Australian breakers frightened the backlash will drive away sponsors and help — which, Wepiha advised me, was already a priority given the lack of presidency funding for breaking as an artwork kind.
As for Gunn, “Above all she’s a human being,” Wepiha mentioned. “We first and foremost just hope that she’s all right.”
Yet if there’s one factor we find out about breaking, it’s that it takes much more than ridicule to, effectively, break it.
Update, September 12, 11:15 am: This story was initially printed on August 14 and has been up to date to incorporate Raygun’s No. 1 rating.