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Science

Raygun turned her Olympic flop into a media career. Now Netflix is helping with the rewrite

The Conversation Australia ·
Raygun turned her Olympic flop into a media career. Now Netflix is helping with the rewrite

The 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics are remembered for many arresting moments, from the astounding Opening Ceremony on the River Seine, to the grand return of champion gymnast Simone Biles .

Less conventionally, millions will recall the performance of Australian breaking athlete B-girl Rachael Gunn – aka Raygun – that reverberated wildly across the globe for long afterwards.

Calculating that she could not compete with her opponents’ athleticism, Gunn developed a breaking aesthetic based on Australiana .

Dressed in an Australian tracksuit, while kangaroo hopping and jerking like a water sprinkler, she tried to impress the judges with creativity rather than power moves.

Gunn was unsuccessful, losing all three round-robin battles and scoring zero.

Although an Olympic judge praised elements of her performance, the backlash that followed was overwhelming.

All this drama has now resulted in a Netflix documentary titled Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly, produced by US filmmakers Chapman Way and Maclain Way, as part of its Untold sport documentary series .

Given the worldwide media coverage of Gunn, including a 2025 ABC Inside Story program, is there much more to say about Australia’s infamous breaker? A broken Gunn Gunn was criticised and mocked in a digital tidal wave of legacy news stories, meme-rich social media, and barbed observations by celebrities including Snoop Dogg and Adele .

She became comic fodder for US late-night talk shows .

Some in the Australian break scene even felt she had satirised them.

Worse, false accusations started to spread of Gunn conspiring with her breaker husband/coach Samuel Free (and others) to rig her selection for Paris.

The rumour led to a Change.org petition , which was later withdrawn.

Then came a nasty intellectual property dispute with Sydney comedian Steph Broadbridge over a planned parody show titled Raygun: The Musical.

Broadbridge eventually axed the show in response to a heavy-handed letter from Gunn’s lawyers.

Read the full article on The Conversation Australia ›

5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on theconversation.com — the content belongs to The Conversation Australia.

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