On the other side of the Paris 2024 Olympics, Australian B-Girl Rachael Gunn has become one of her highest profile competitors. But it’s not because of a record or a gold medal – it’s because, for the past week, Raygun has become one of the internet’s latest villains.
Gunn is a 36-year-old lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney. She has a PhD in cultural studies, and her research interests include the cultural politics of her sport. She was first recognized with the break in 2008 and has been Australia’s highest-ranked breaker since regional organization AUSBreaking began publishing its 2020 rankings.
She is now a worldwide meme as well. Gunn’s performance at the Olympics, while wearing Team Australia’s green and gold sweats and a polo shirt, quickly went viral after people compared her kangaroo moves to a dancing baby. The ensuing conflagration paralleled the rise of other oft-mentioned figures such as Lin-Manuel Miranda or Ed Sheeran, except that it was violently accelerated by the hypervisibility of the Olympics.
But the meme enthusiasm surrounding Gunn has given way not only to harassment and bullying, but also to misinformation. Raygun, the meme villain, demands accountability, and they think people have: False, easily debunked claims about the qualification process and her history have spread across the Internet after the meme went viral.
Raygun memes were rooted in both mockery and honest criticism
The initial wave of memes about Gunn was, for the most part, mocking her performance. Gunn lost all three of her round robin bouts at the Olympics against wrestlers from the United States, France and Lithuania. Clips of her performance spread across social platforms like X (formerly Twitter), showing Gunn contorting her body on the bar floor.
Eventually, people learned about Gunn’s academic background as well.
“Finding out she’s a PhD in cultural studies focusing on breakdancing culture has me beyond surprised,” said one Twitter user, later clarifying that the comment was not intended as an insult.
Gunn’s personal experience of breaking informs her research, and she even published a paper in 2023 about the “sportification” of breaking through her involvement in the Olympics. But as a white woman, there is tension in the fact that she has become the most prominent face of a sport that was pioneered by black and brown people, even if it wasn’t necessarily by her will.
Baltimore Banner columnist Leslie Gray Streeter wrote that Gunn’s performance at the Olympics felt “not only shocking, but humiliating.”
The mockery shifted to misinformation as people questioned the legitimacy of Raygun’s qualification
On August 11, two days after Gunn competed in Paris, a Change.org petition titled “Hold Raygun Rachel Gunn and Anna Mears Accountable for Olympic Choice of Unethical Behavior” was published. Published anonymously by Someone Who Hates Corruption, the petition accused Gunn of “creating her own governing body”, rigging her qualifying process and denying underprivileged dancers funding to compete in the qualifiers. He also suggested that her husband and coach, Samuel Free, may have judged her fitness.
None of these are true. Gunn’s qualifying event, the 2023 WDSF Oceania Breaking Championship, was facilitated by AUSBreaking. Gunn did not found that organization, nor was she ever involved in its leadership. Her husband, Free, was not one of the judges listed for the event. And the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) said in a statement on Thursday that Gunn “has no responsibility for any funding decisions in her sport”.
Others have shared screenshots of the satirical posts on social media as if they were true, such as one from Facebook meme parody site The Sports Memery depicting Raygun saying she trained for “exactly 37 minutes” before competing.
The Change.org petition, which has since been removed, served as a vehicle for his claims to spread on social media, prompting the AOC to request its removal in the statement linked above. On Thursday, a spokesperson for Change.org told Business Insider in an emailed statement that after being reported for misinformation, the petition was reviewed against the platform’s community guidelines and ultimately removed.
Before this point, he had reached over 56,000 signatures, for one archived photo.
Rachael Gun – “Raygun” – competes in the 2023 WDSF Oceania Breaking Championship. Odd Anderson/AFP via Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Gunn won her qualifying match, and she has been an established offender in the Australian community for years. But the hype around Gunn and her almost villainous status fit the narrative: only a woman who had entered the Olympics could have performed at the level the memes made her seem.
Memes, as NBC reported in 2019, can dehumanize their subjects. Even when faced with reasonable and good-faith criticism, the fact that the jokes came first may lend levity to what are very serious allegations not only about Gunn, but also about the sports charges that underpinned her Olympic competition.
After all, Gunn has become the ultimate breakout Olympic debut story, the excitement around her heightened by the visible nature of the event itself. The sport won’t feature again at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics (a decision made before the Paris games), but that doesn’t mean it’s gone forever – perhaps it will have another shot at the 2032 Brisbane games, again Raygun’s home territory.
What about Gunn himself? In a video posted on Instagram on Thursday, the athlete said she was taking a pre-planned vacation in Europe. Athletics organisations, including AUSBreaking and the Australian Olympic Committee, have supported the debut of virulent claims about her dancing career.
For now, it’s unclear what the future holds for that career. But the internet moves fast – and hopefully Raygun’s status as an internet conspiracy figure and villain will too.