Australian Olympian Rachael “Raygun” Gunn, who gained global notoriety after her breakdancing routine at the Paris Olympics sparked widespread mockery and backlash, has spoken out for the first time since the incident.
In an interview on Wednesday, September 4, Gunn, 36, admitted that she hasn’t yet watched her full performance, which included kangaroo hops and sprinkler moves, but plans to do so eventually.
“I’ve seen bits and pieces, but I will watch it eventually,” Gunn told Network 10’s “The Project.”
Despite scoring zero points in all three of her Olympic battles, Gunn also confessed that she hasn’t been able to bring herself to watch a comedy sketch on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon, where comedian Rachel Dratch parodied her routine.
“I haven’t actually watched the sketch because I don’t think I’m in a place to watch it,” Gunn said, expressing mixed feelings about the skit. “I don’t know whether to hug him or yell at him,” she added, referring to Fallon.
During the interview, Gunn defended her breakdancing credentials but also apologized to Australia’s breakdancing community for the controversy her performance caused.
When asked if she genuinely considers herself Australia’s best female breakdancer, she replied, “I think my record speaks to that,” citing her top rankings as an Australian B-girl in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and her invitations to World Championships. “But anything can happen in a battle,” she noted.
Gunn’s routine, performed in an Australian team polo and high-waisted sweatpants, quickly went viral—a fact she was unaware of until an Australian Olympic Committee liaison informed her.
“As soon as I finished my rounds, my media liaison from the AOC said, ‘Oh, there’s a bit of a storm brewing on social media. You might want to go off socials,’” Gunn recalled. “I didn’t understand the scale of it. I previewed some comments, and I was like, ‘Oh, no,’ and this kind of sick feeling started coming out.”
She expressed regret over the backlash her performance caused but acknowledged that she couldn’t control people’s reactions.
In the wake of the controversy, Gunn, who is also a breakdancing researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, faced accusations of manipulating the Olympic selection process by establishing her own governing body and having her husband judge the qualification trial. These allegations were later refuted by the Australian Olympic Committee and the World DanceSport Federation.
