The Person Behind the Humiliation

Last year, I did a fun little exercise with my students (I’m a middle school teacher these days, by the way) where I wrote a paragraph about Raygun — the Australian break dancer who went viral at the Summer Olympics in 2024 — and removed all of the adjectives. I asked my students to watch video footage of Raygun and provide their own adjectives, describing her as either the GOAT or an Embarrassment. It was a revealing exercise not only about adjectives, but how different people could watch the same thing and arrive at a different conclusion.

I want to say the same thing about Netflix’s new documentary on the subject, Untold: Raygun Breaking Badly and Rachel Gunn’s Olympic breakdancing performance. For a lot of folks — particularly those who otherwise don’t watch a lot of sporting competitions — it was the best thing about those Summer Olympics. This lady — Rachel Gunn, an academic, who holds an actual PhD in breakdancing — was shut out in one of the most widely humiliating performances in the history of any sport. But, as with so many of these things, the mocking laughter turned to derision (often misogynistic in nature) before — with time — morphing into something mostly akin to … joy.

I mean, it was a bad series of performances. But the documentary, at least, provides some context, and that context gets you to the joy much quicker. The long and short of it is this: Rachel Gunn is a good breakdancer, but she has a quirky, original style, and that quirky, original style allowed her to compete against what I assume is probably a fairly small pool of competitors in Australia.

It was being invited to the Olympics, however, that ultimately transformed her into a meme. Given the much higher level of competition, Raygun endeavored to step up her game by incorporating “power moves” into her routine. She just didn’t have enough time to develop the body strength necessary to make those power moves, but she spent much of the year she had to train trying to do something she ultimately had to scrap.

By the time the Olympics came around, both Gunn and her husband — a well-known breakdancer in Australia and her coach — basically knew that she didn’t have a chance in hell against that level of competition. Their hope, ultimately, was to save face and score at least one point in the three competitions. She did not (she was shut out 54-0).

But that last routine — the one that elicited all the laughter — was Gunn’s attempt to score at least one point by doing something unique while paying tribute to Australia. There was a kangaroo move, a sprinkler (a dance that apparently originated in Australia), and moves inspired by Australia’s swim team. Of course, most people outside of Australia didn’t understand those references, so it all ended up what it became: worldwide humiliation that led to Gunn’s decision to quit dancing (for a while, anyway) and even go into seclusion to deal with the anxiety of that humiliation.

Honestly, it’s kind of a heartbreaking story, or it would be if not for the coda, because a lot of people did eventually come to appreciate her routine for what it was: an expression of joyful patriotism. Or at least that’s the way the documentary frames it, because we all like a happy ending. And personally, I’m not cynical enough to rob that poor woman of it. Is she the GOAT? No, not even close. But she shouldn’t be depicted as a total embarrassment, either.