She Made Breakdancing a Joke at the Olympics. Now She’s Back in an Infuriating New Netflix Documentary.

Sports What’s So Infuriating About Netflix’s Raygun Documentary By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nadira Goffe? Sept 02, 202612:24 PM Netflix Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I come bearing unfortunate news: We’re talking about Raygun again. You might remember her from the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, at which breakdancing, or breaking, had followed a rather controversial road to debuting as an Olympic sport. The internal hesitation in the dance world concerning breaking’s Olympic premiere wound up being justified, considering that the story of breaking at the Olympics became dominated not by the stellar medalists who performed impressive gymnastic tricks or by the competitors who staged rallying political messages. Instead, breaking’s Olympic debut became synonymous with one name: Raygun. Raygun, a now-39-year-old Australian academic and dancer whose real name is Rachael Gunn, became an instant global meme and point of widespread mockery when she displayed her, let’s say, unconventional dance style at the Olympics. Now the incident is the subject of a new documentary, an episode of Netflix’s Untold Sports series, titled Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly. The scores are in: The documentary is infuriating. Breaking Badly starts by outlining Gunn’s history in breaking. She was introduced to the art form by Samuel Free, her now husband and coach. Two talking-head interviews with fellow Aussie B-girls Tinylocks and Flix present them as voices in this documentary meant to speak to Gunn’s talent. Both B-girls have known and been competing against Gunn for over a decade, but still, Flix can only hedge when describing Gunn’s style, using the words quirky and unique. Meanwhile, Tinylocks acknowledges Gunn’s capability but abides by the mantra of “No easy props,” refusing to congratulate Gunn unless she believes accolades are due—which, throughout the doc, Tinylocks rarely does. Gunn’s love of breaking inspired her to get a Ph.D. and craft a dissertation exploring gender in breakdancing. Over the years, as an academic by day and B-girl by night, Raygun kept competing. It was a shock to both her and Free when she managed to qualify to represent Oceania in the Olympics by winning the qualifying daylong tournament. Afterward, Gunn—a breaker whose strengths lie more on the side of artistry, let’s say, than on the side of the awe-inspiring power moves that breakdancing is known for—trained relentlessly before realizing that she couldn’t keep up with the reigning champs, who have been throwing astounding power moves in international competition for years. “It had become obvious to us that we weren’t even going to win one battle at the Olympics,” Free says, explaining that nabbing just one vote from the panel of nine judges would have felt like a victory. Where some would sooner bow out than potentially embarrass themselves or their beloved sport, Raygun decided to focus on the artistic side of her breaking, which involved, in part, doing moves that represented Australian iconography, like swimming, kangaroos, and the sprinkler, the cheesy dance move that apparently came from Down Under. Raygun didn’t receive a single point at the Olympics, but instantly a meme was born. Within minutes, the whole world was laughing at her online. This devolved into nastiness and cruelty, and Gunn subsequently took a step back from breaking. Now she’s competing again. The ending to Raygun’s Olympic story is truly unfortunate. I saw a number of people transition from lightheartedly laughing at Gunn on social media to spreading deeply vitriolic words and awful claims about her. I don’t doubt that the mockery was relentless; I don’t doubt that this was a very rough period for Gunn. I also don’t doubt that she meant well. But I would note that she’s not the real victim here, as much as this documentary tries to make it seem that way. She knew she wasn’t good enough to represent the sport, but she chose to do it regardless, despite realizing the stakes for both herself and the art form. Breaking Badly leaves no room for Gunn, the International Olympic Committee, or any other governing body that poorly conceived how breaking could be integrated as an Olympic sport, to take accountability for making a mockery of it. And, yes, all involved parties should apologize. In today’s era of incendiary culture wars, there are constant discussions about what counts as cultural appropriation vs. appreciation. The reality is, there is a near-indistinguishable line between the two, separated only by a consideration of a culture’s history and politics. Breaking wasn’t just “cool”; it was an art form created and performed as an act of self-expression and defiance by a disenfranchised community, Black and brown residents of New York City. The sport was not respected by people outside that community—Breaking Badly reveals that breaking was even considered a joke when it was announced as an Olympic sport—and because of that, it had to craft its own world of respect, rules, and values. This tradition was upheld by a large group of dancers for generations. Gunn’s failure at the Olympics—and as much as the documentary tries to reframe it, it was a failure—didn’t just make her the butt of a never-ending joke. Her blunder also undermined the entire art form, an art form that she is, frankly, a guest to. A large portion of the documentary centers on Gunn’s wake-up call, after qualifying, as she realizes that the B-girls she will go up against are years beyond her in technique. It was only three months out from the Olympics, when Gunn went to compete at an international competition, that it apparently “first started occurring” to her that she “was going to go up against world champs and people who’d been winning competitions on big stages for years and years.” I find this professed naiveté insulting. I am not a breaker—my knees are made of papier-mâché—but I have access to the internet and an interest in dance. Before breaking was revealed as an Olympic sport, I was already familiar with the top names in major global breaking competitions, like Battle of the Year and Red Bull BC One, through social media alone. I was aware that the standard of breaking today greatly favors power moves. For a white woman participating in a historically Black and brown art form, who has written a dissertation on said art form—B-roll of cultural studies books Gunn used to write her dissertation includes titles such as Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Nika Kramer’s We B*Girlz, and Mike Hill’s Whiteness: A Critical Reader—to not do basic research before attempting to qualify to represent breaking at the Olympics is just rude and inconsiderate. Still, when all is said and done, I find most fault for breaking’s shoddy Olympics reputation to lie with the architects of the sport’s Olympic run: the IOC and the World DanceSport Federation. It’s not easy to scale an athletic art form into an international codified sports system, especially not without losing some of the art form’s magic in the process. Raygun is just a dancer who slipped through the cracks of a nascent system. I don’t think she should be burned at the stake for wanting to dance, and everyone should be encouraged to try new art forms and learn about other cultures. Yet this feels as if a klutz came into someone else’s house, was handed a glass of red wine, and spilled it all over their white carpet. Even if part of the stain can be lifted out, a lingering mark will always remain. We can resent the klutz for the role she played, but more importantly, someone served red wine knowing there was a white carpet, and someone let the klutz in—that’s the IOC and the WDSF in this scenario. In her own defense, Gunn says she knows she’s “a dorky white woman who’s an academic” and she’s “OK with that.” But what about the Black and brown people whose art form wound up tarnished as a result? It’s true that, as Gunn says, “it’s not always about the most athletic movement, it’s about the art,” but it’s also about understanding when you are the best representation of something and when it’s more responsible for you to sit down and let someone else have their time to shine. Gunn, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to fully understand the role she played in the reputation of the art form as a whole, reducing much of the pushback to misogynistic bile, of people having “a lot of opinions about what women do” and “what women should do.” That may be part of the equation, but it’s far from the whole picture. Toward the end of the documentary, Free says that Gunn’s “performance connected with people, whether that’s genuine excitement and entertainment or outrage. It generated discourse and got the entire world talking.” But no one is talking about the more important question: How has the dance community moved on from this? Breaking Badly could have focused in part on other dancers, what they thought about the incident, and how they’re interacting with the dance community now. Especially because there are some cool things happening! For example, the dance community is trying to build more of its own globally standardized tournaments, like the newly formed International Dance League. Instead, Breaking Badly continues to omit these voices in favor of Gunn’s sole experience. No oi, oi, oi! here—more like oy vey. Netflix Olympics Race Sports TV