Did Raygun, the extremely memeable breaker who took the Olympics by storm, should be there?

In October 2023, members of the the World DanceSport Federation, or WDSF, realized breaking, the game they’d been attempting to make occur on the Olympics for years, wouldn’t be showing on the 2028 Los Angeles Video games.

In response, the group’s president, Shawn Tay, made a grand proclamation. “Making certain the success of breaking’s Olympic debut at Paris 2024 is subsequently on the forefront of the WDSF agenda,” he mentioned. “Our efficiency in Paris will outline the way forward for dance sport inside the Olympic Motion.”

Going into the video games, breaking had quite a bit driving on its shoulders. However nobody counted on Raygun — the newly notorious, 36-year-old, last-place Australian b-girl (as breakers are known as) whose performance on the Paris stage included weird floor-writhing, awkward freezes, and “authentic” strikes like kangaroo hops.

Raygun, actual identify Rachael Gunn, immediately turned a viral sensation — notoriety that solely skyrocketed when the general public realized that Gunn, who gained none of her Olympics battles, really has a PhD in breakdancing. Sure, actually. Gunn’s efficiency has not solely overshadowed the 2 precise breaking gold medalists, Japan’s Yuasa Ami and Canada’s Phil Wizard (plus 16-year-old Australian b-boy Jeff Dunne), it’s arguably grow to be the defining second of a Parisian Video games marked by controversy and absurdity.

However alongside widespread mockery of Gunn herself runs hypothesis that Gunn’s presence on the Video games needed to be some form of mistake, even corruption. Certainly, this couldn’t be one of the best Australia needed to provide? How did Raygun wind up on the Olympics when, for instance, final weekend in Melbourne a few b-girls had been serving these strikes?

To reply this query, we’ve got to go on a little bit of a deep dive — so let’s (sorry) hop on in.

For many years, the WDSF was dedicated to ballroom dancing. The affiliation began within the late ’90s with a deal with profitable a spot within the Olympics for ballroom dancing earlier than its subsequent pivot, round 2017, towards breaking. A quizzical backstory, sure — but it surely doesn’t make the group much less reliable. Te Hiiritanga Wepiha, aka Rush, one of many judges within the girls’s breaking ultimate for the Oceania championship Gunn gained, posted a 90-minute livestreamed Instagram commentary on Tuesday in response to the controversy. He identified that the WDSF judging system, used within the Olympics and its breaking qualifiers, requires judges to be veterans within the breaking scene, each as opponents and as judges, in addition to to go a number of exams. “You must be skilled to be a choose,” he insisted.

This wasn’t Gunn’s first rodeo both. Previous to her Olympics look, she represented Australia at a number of World Championship competitions between 2021 and 2023. She judged Crimson Bull’s preeminent BC One breaking contest. She’s a longtime native champ.

But following Gunn’s look on the Olympics, a petition circulated claiming, with out sources, that Gunn and her husband, breaking coach Samuel Free, had manipulated the whole WDSF system with the intention to acquire a spot on the Olympics. The petition falsely claimed Gunn had judged herself on the qualifying Oceania championship competitors — regardless of the judges’ record for the occasion being available on the WDSF web site.

Different rumors additional alleged, once more with none obvious sourcing, that Gunn and her husband had been the masterminds behind the Australian Breaking Affiliation, higher often known as AUSBreaking — one other simply debunked declare. An AUSBreaking spokesperson additional confirmed to Vox in an electronic mail that Gunn and her husband didn’t discovered the group. Gunn doesn’t look like instantly chargeable for managing, or funding, any breaking group, which possible additionally negates the petition’s declare that she denied journey funding to a marginalized dance crew from Australia’s Northern Territory.

The subtext of this criticism — that Gunn benefited from her whiteness — has advantage. Gunn was educated at one among Sydney’s most elite excessive colleges; she had the chance to get a PhD in an obscure subject, and the wealth to fund appearances at worldwide breaking competitions. Her white privilege in a dance scene rife with cultural appropriation makes her a simple goal for criticism. On the identical time, some have tried to argue she represents precisely the other — a “range rent” and Australian “wokeness” gone fallacious. “Folks have jumped on and used her as the brand new scapegoat to additional their trigger,” Wepiha noticed in his livestream.

“We by no means thought this may occur,” he advised me. “She’s getting torn down by lots of people.”

Nonetheless, whereas the remainder of the world has put Gunn by means of the ringer since her Paris look, the precise breaking neighborhood appears to have rallied behind her.

“That is what occurs when folks exterior of our dance need to management the narrative however have completely no experience of technical information on our dance, significantly in an Oceania context,” Dujon Cullingford, a veteran New Zealand breaker who attended the Oceania qualifiers, advised me. Cullingford wrote a Fb publish arguing in opposition to the concept Gunn benefited from any issue apart from a small expertise pool.

He emphasised that Oceania’s breaking neighborhood is tiny; one among Gunn’s personal articles positioned the variety of Australian breakers at round 400, whole, and Wepiha claimed the WDSF needed to “get folks out of retirement with the intention to make up the numbers” of opponents. One of many principal criticisms being bandied about considerations a public notion that the WDSF should not have been selling their occasions amongst “actual” breaking scenes, however somewhat elitist communities like universities. However each Cullingford and Wepiha rejected this concept. “It’s very straightforward to know if there’s a jam on as a result of the scene is tiny,” Wepiha mentioned.

“Down right here, like different international locations, we really feel the squeeze of price of dwelling, and the breaking scene is small so it doesn’t produce lots of people who’ve time to show, lead crews, and mobilize the neighborhood in the identical means,” Cullingford mentioned.

He famous that, additional diminishing the small expertise pool, many breakers selected to not compete within the Olympics qualifiers as a result of they didn’t need to shell out the money wanted to journey to the competitors in Sydney final November. Moreover, many breakers merely had little interest in collaborating because of the feeling that the efforts of the institution to rope breaking into the inflexible organizational construction of the Video games was antithetical to avenue dance tradition. Based on Wepiha, many dancers felt casual jams are extra expressive with much less strict judging — the type of breaking they need to do, versus Olympic-level battling.

After which there was Raygun.

“She rocked up like everyone else,” Wepiha mentioned in his livestream relating to Gunn’s Oceania qualifier. “She gained truthful and sq..” He identified that of the ten judges on the occasion, just one was white and none had been Australian — a reality AUSBreaking additionally confirmed to Vox. “She gained by majority choice, she battled like everybody else … it’s not that deep.”

You’ll be able to choose for your self: within the Oceania Championships Raygun gained which secured her spot within the Olympics, she netted 51 general factors to 50 scored by her opponent Holy Molly (Molly Chapman). The essential ultimate factors got here on this battle when the pair confronted off, with Raygun profitable two of three rounds.

Since Gunn turned a viral sensation, many individuals have watched this battle and claimed that Molly was the clear winner, but it surely’s not so easy. For one factor, these judges had seen their general performances all through the competitors. If Molly was recycling strikes from earlier battles whereas Raygun saved issues distinctive, the judges most likely would have favored Raygun. Different elements to remember embrace issues like who was extra on beat, which dancer spent extra time on ground strikes versus the transitional dance strikes known as toprock, whose actions had been stronger and extra fluid, whose strikes had been crisper and extra exact, and whose transitions had been extra fascinating.

Previous to this, each Chapman and Gunn competed within the World Championships in Belgium in September 2023. Whereas neither of them certified then, out of 80 opponents, Gunn ranked sixty fourth — a full 15 slots forward of Chapman, who got here in subsequent to final.

All of this implies, regardless of the viral narrative that’s hooked up to her, it isn’t so simple as writing Gunn’s Olympics entrance off as a hilarious fluke or a mark of privileged corruption. Certainly, in response to Gunn, she supposed to deliver a mode of motion to the Paris Video games that was much less about assembly expectations and extra about making an indelible influence.

“What I needed to do was come out right here and do one thing new and completely different and artistic — that’s my power, my creativity,” Gunn advised ESPN.

“I used to be by no means going to beat these ladies on what they do greatest, the dynamic and the facility strikes, so I needed to maneuver in another way, be inventive and artistic as a result of what number of possibilities do you get … in a lifetime to try this.”

Gunn has been reflecting on what her model is for a while. In one among her tutorial articles on breaking, she argues,“Gender norms each articulate and restrict my corporeal potential.” Gunn has additionally written about what she sees because the dance’s “normative development” of masculinity.

In different phrases, the weirdness of Gunn’s dance… is likely to be the entire level. Furthermore, in additional casual breaking venues, it’s not even that bizarre. “What Raygun showcased on the Olympics is that breaking is a spectrum,” Wepiha mentioned in his livestream. He argued her model represents that extra casual, self-expressive facet of avenue dance. “She went up there and did what plenty of you complaining may by no means do. She was her genuine self.”

You could effectively ask: However don’t we’ve got to carry Olympians to the next commonplace of excellence? Even when that excellence is cast from a masculinist development of athleticism and dance?

Nicely… can we? There’s each indication Gunn is at present probably the most well-known b-girl on this planet, and whereas most individuals are laughing at her, not together with her, someplace within the broad huge world of breaking, different b-girls could really feel impressed somewhat than shamed and mortified.

In spite of everything, even by the Olympics requirements, Gunn didn’t try this badly. For those who have a look at the judges’ scoring, for instance, of her battle with US breaker Logistx, you’ll be able to see that whereas she nabbed zero rounds, a handful of judges had her beating Logistx in some subcategories, often originality. In the meantime, whereas Logistx gained most classes, she usually solely gained by just a few proportion factors at greatest.

In different phrases, Gunn arguably held her personal on the Olympics beneath a once-in-a-lifetime quantity of stress, and she or he did it whereas attempting out her personal distinctive model.

Was it nice? No. Was it unhealthy? Evidently not as unhealthy as we thought.

The paradox leaves us with a large number; many (although actually not all) of the folks heaping criticism upon Gunn are individuals who barely knew what breaking was a fortnight in the past, whereas most of the folks speeding to defend her are breaking veterans. In between are the individuals who simply need to meme. The scenario has some Australian breakers apprehensive the backlash will drive away sponsors and help — which, Wepiha advised me, was already a priority given lack of presidency funding for breaking as an artwork type.

As for Gunn, “Above all she’s a human being,” Wepiha mentioned. “We at the beginning simply hope that she’s all proper.”

But if there’s one factor we find out about breaking, it’s that it takes much more than ridicule to, effectively, break it.