Raygun, the Olympic breakdancer who became a laughing stock, says she is retiring because of the backlash

Rachael Gunn, better known as “Raygun” of Team Australia, competed at the Paris Olympics.

The Olympic breakdancer Rachael “Raygun” Gunn is retiring from the sport after facing a barrage of online hate and misinformation.

The 37-year-old Australian became a laughing stock this summer after her viral Paris Olympics performance, which included moves that were compared to a kangaroo hopping and the dancing of a child.

The B-girl was eliminated at the round-robin stage of the women’s breaking competition, losing to the US’s Logistx, France’s Syssy, and Lithuania’s Nicka.

Gunn said the backlash to her performance was so “upsetting” that she’d decided to quit competitive break dancing.

“I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems a really difficult thing for me to do now, to approach a battle,” Gunn told 2DayFM, a Sydney radio station, on Wednesday.

“I still dance, and I still break, but that’s like, in my living room with my partner,” she said.

Gunn added that the scrutiny she faced had been “really upsetting” and “impossible to process.”

“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 said.

Facing rumors and viral fame

Amid the criticism of Gunn’s routine, the breaker was also subjected to false rumors about how she obtained her spot in the games, including one rumor that her husband and coach, Samuel Free, was a judge in her qualifying event.

This was refuted by AUSBreaking, who said in a statement that Free “was not a member of the selection panel or judging committee” as that would have been a “conflict of interest.”

Gunn went viral after the Paris Olympics. 

Gunn’s performance also prompted commentary from celebrities such as Adele and Jimmy Fallon.

Speaking at her concert in Munich in August, Adele said Gunn’s performance was her “favorite thing that’s happened in the Olympics.”

“If you haven’t seen it, please leave the show and Google it, ’cause it is LOLs,” Adele said.

Fallon, meanwhile, poked fun at the Olympian’s performance during a sketch on “The Tonight Show.”

Speaking to 2DayFM, Gunn said she appreciated the more positive comments she’d received.

“That’s what gets me through, the people that are like, ‘You have inspired me to go out there and do something that I’ve been too shy to do, you’ve brought joy, you brought laughter, we’re so proud of you,'” she said.

“And just really fricking lovely things that people have written, and that’s what I hold on to.”

Breaking won’t be part of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The decision had nothing to do with the controversy surrounding Gunn’s performance; the International Olympic Committee announced the line-up of sports to be featured in the 2028 games back in 2022, People reported.

Gunn competing at the 2023 WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships. 

Joycelyn Wilson, a faculty member in Black media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Fortune that the decision to include the sport in the 2024 games gave the industry a much-needed boost of “cultural recognition and validation.”

“Having that Olympic stamp for any sport changes the game of play,” Born Barikor, the chair of the UK organisation Breaking GB, told Fortune.

It’s not clear what’s next for Gunn, though she seems to have plenty of other career avenues to pursue.

Gunn is an academic and lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, where she focuses on research on the “cultural politics of breaking,” according to her faculty profile. She gained a doctorate in cultural studies in 2017.

In 2013, she coauthored an article about how the Olympics’ institutionalization would affect the Australian breaking scene.

During an interview on Nova 96.9 Sydney, an Australian radio station, earlier this week, Gunn said she’d turned down several offers to appear on reality shows after the Olympics.

Representatives for Gunn didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17.