Raygun is sorry, but she believes she is Australia’s best breakdancer: “My record proves it”

Updated: 3 Hours ago Published: 3 Hours ago

LOS ANGELES — The B-girl known as Raygun has apologized to Australia’s breakdancing community for the backlash that followed her viral performance while representing the country at the Paris Olympics last month.

However, in the same interview, Rachael Gunn defended her qualifications to compete during breakdancing’s debut as an Olympic sport and backed a widely ridiculed routine that included an imitation of a kangaroo among other unconventional moves.

“I’m very sorry for the reaction that the community has experienced, but I can’t control how people react,” Gunn, a university professor from Sydney who turned 37 on Monday, told Waleed Aly on an episode of Australian talk show “The Project” that aired Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, we need more resources in Australia to have a chance of being world champions. Historically, we haven’t had the best record of winning world championships, so I don’t think it’s just my fault.”

In August, a petition on change.org demanded an investigation into the selection process that allowed Gunn to participate in the contest. It received more than 57,000 signatures, but the website removed the petition after it was “flagged for misinformation and reviewed in accordance with our Community Guidelines,” the site said in a statement.

“The conspiracy theories were just horrible,” Gunn told Aly. “It was so upsetting, because it wasn’t just people who didn’t understand what breaking was and were angry about my performance. It was people who were now attacking our reputation and our integrity. And none of it was based in any kind of facts.”

Asked how she qualified for the Paris Games, Gunn paused before stating matter-of-factly, “I won the Oceania championships,” referring to the qualifying competition held last fall in Sydney.

“As simple as that?” Aly said.

“It was a straight-up classification,” Gunn replied with a laugh. “Yeah.”

Aly then asked Gunn if he had had any prior relationships with any of the qualifying judges.

“There were nine judges, all foreigners,” Gunn said. “I don’t think any of them had ever judged anything I was involved in before.”

Gunn said he did his best to protect himself from backlash by taking a break from social media and the Internet in general.

“It was really sad to see how much hate it evoked,” Gunn said. “And a lot of the response, though, is also because people aren’t very familiar with breaking and the diversity of approaches to it… The energy and vitriol that people had was pretty alarming.”

Aly asked Gunn if she thinks she is the best breakdancer in Australia.

“Well, I think my record speaks to that,” Gunn said. “I was the top-ranked Australian B-girl in 2020, 2022 and 2023. I’ve been invited to represent them at a lot of world championships – Paris, Korea. You know, the record is there, but anything can happen in a battle.”

Gunn said he hasn’t yet seen her Olympic performance. He also hasn’t seen the skit on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” that mocked her. But, Gunn said, he plans to watch both at some point.

“I’m still in the process of being able to describe how I feel about all of this,” she said, “because it feels like a very strange dream I’ve been having, that I’m going to wake up from at any moment.”