Raygun: how a 36-year-old academic and breakdancer won the meme Olympics

Breaking made its long-awaited debut at the Olympics over the weekend, and there was one B-Girl who stole the show: Raygun (real name Rachel Gunn), the 36-year-old, cultural studies academic from Australia who scored zero points, but whose performance launched a thousand memes.

Describing her unconventional breaking style, Gunn said: “I was never going to beat those girls on what they do best – their power moves. What I bring is creativity.” It’s hard to argue with that. Moves like the “kangaroo” – which she repeated at the closing ceremony last night – are nothing if not original. Maybe her vision was just too bold, maybe she was ahead of her time, because the public did not agree: the response to her performance on social media has ranged from light-hearted mockery to vicious denunciations to outright conspiracy theories.

Because Gunn is an academic who researches ‘breaking culture’, some people speculated that her routine was deliberately bad, as part of an elaborate, situationist prank intended to undermine the Olympics or, as one journalist put it, to make “some subversive point she can later write journal articles about” – how else to explain someone looking kind of goofy while breakdancing? Others argued – more convincingly – that her participation reflects a racial bias in Australian sports: there are plenty of talented Black and Brown breakers in Australia, but the spot was afforded to a white woman who, however generous you want to be, is simply not that skilled. This reflects a failure of outreach, a failure to look for talent where it resides.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Raygun reveals that she was in on the joke, but it seems more likely that she gave it her best shot and that her idiosyncratic style just didn’t land. In her defence, she has brought joy to millions, even if they’re laughing at rather than with her – sometimes, being bad at something in an interesting and unusual way is more entertaining than being straight-up good. And even if there were better B-Girls from Australia who could have taken the slot, she can hardly be accused of benefiting from preferential treatment at the tournament itself – she didn’t win any points! Her performance might have been a flop, but when it comes to the Olympic prize for Being a Silly Goose, Raygun has taken home the gold.