Raygun quits competitive breakdancing after 'kangaroo' dance mocked at Paris Olympics
7 November 2024, 06:08
Competitive breakdancer 'Raygun' whose dance moves stole the show for Australia at the 2024 Paris Olympics has announced she's quitting international competition.
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Rachael Gunn, 37, known competitively as 'Raygun', declared her professional career over in an interview which saw the dancer brand online conspiracies “really upsetting”.
Ms Gunn's controversial routine in Paris saw her unleash moves including the much-ridiculed "kangaroo" move, which forced the dancer to defend her selection.
It led to claims she did not take the event seriously, with questions raised over the transparency of the process which saw the 'breaking professor' qualify as the national representative.
“I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems a really difficult thing for me to do now, to approach a battle,” she told 2DayFm on Wednesday.
“I still dance and I still break but that’s like, in my living room with my partner,” she added.
Despite criticism, recent months saw Gunn ranked best breakdancer in the world - to the surprise of many.
The World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF) said that its rankings were based on dancers' best four performances from the past year.
Following her Olympics performance, Ms Gunn later apologised, adding she was "very sorry" for the backlash, but suggested much of the criticism was down to ignorance.
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Speaking with the Australian radio station, she said: "Dancing is so much fun and it makes you feel good and I don't think people should feel crap about, you know, the way that they dance".
However, following widespread criticism and conspiracies about how she came to represent Australia, Ms Gunn hit out at the "politics" of breaking.
One of the most circulated internet rumours suggested the dancer was nothing more than an "industry plant".
Overshadowing breakdancings debut at the summer games, the performance led to some "totally wild" theories that Gunn says were "impossible to process".
“It’s still impossible to process, the conspiracy theories were totally wild, and it was really upsetting because I felt like I just didn’t have any control over how people saw me or who I was, who my partner was, my story,” she said.
“The level of scrutiny that’s going to be there and people will be filming it and it will go online, and it’s just not going to mean the same thing, it’s not going to be the same experience because of everything that’s at stake,” she added.
