I never like to pile on. If someone is truly getting beaten up, I prefer to be the one who makes peace and calms the situation down. However, I’m a journalist at heart, so if anyone is gaming the system, I’m usually the first one to dig deeper, especially if I notice that no one else is doing the job.

This is one of those times.

Like so many people, I was captivated during the 2024 Summer Olympics by the inaugural Breaking competition – and especially by viral sensation “Raygun” (also known as Rachael Gunn) from Australia. Her performances were nothing short of comical, especially since I already started with a very skeptical – if not downright low – impression of this as an Olympic sport. That impression improved when I saw some of the other contestants such as Logistx (a.k.a. Logan Elanna Edra), who was my favorite during the competition.

Credit: Ezra Shaw/ Getty Images

And then came Raygun. And then came the laughter – followed by even more laughter. And I wasn’t the only one. Raygun’s three Olympic matches were so insane that they generated countless jokes and spoofs. Even Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show got involved. (If you haven’t seen Rachel Dratch’s hilarious send-up, you really need to take a look.)

You’ve heard enough reviews and recaps about her that you don’t need another one here. Suffice to say that my impression of Olympic Breaking was confirmed in those moments. But in the week since the end of the Games, we’ve heard so much about Ms. Gunn and even more from her. She’s crying foul about the hatred she’s received from people who are lashing out about the silliness they saw in her alleged dances.

Of course, if you’d like to go back and see those performances, good luck. I was fortunate enough to catch them earlier this week on Peacock, but now the platform has removed every shred of breaking competition. And it’s the only sport that doesn’t have even a recap, “best of” video. Go ahead and check it out. Do you want to see handball greatness? It’s there. Artistic Swimming. Yup. Badminton? All there. Even Rhythmic Gymnastics, though having no full matches, has clips from the competition. What is it that Peacock doesn’t want us to see? We’ll come back to that.

Raygun has been unapologetic about her performances since last Sunday. If anything, she’s defended her own brand of artistry. “I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best – their power moves,” Ms. Gunn told ESPN. “What I bring is creativity.”

Uh, OK. One woman’s creativity is another woman’s clown show. But before we get to the hatred she’s supposedly receiving, let’s take a look at how Raygun got to Paris.

Initially, I heard – as so many of you did – that she gamed the system, partly by involving her husband as part of the judging process. That was easy enough to believe. After all, how else would someone so obviously beneath the ability of the other competitors find her way onto the international stage? But then came proof to the contrary. Ms. Gunn had actually won the qualifying breaking competition in Australia.

At this point, I was confused. Why hadn’t we seen the video proof that showed how incredibly terrible she was in Australia? Why hadn’t the media delved deeper to show us her ridiculous past?

The answer? She didn’t have that ridiculous of a past. The videos of her matches at the Australian qualifier are all online. And while she was nowhere near the caliber of her eventual Olympic counterparts, she, in the words of my daughter, “was actually good.” Now, that’s good from a layman’s point of view. If I go out to Jacksonville Beach and see someone dancing at her level, I’m saying, “Not bad.” But if I’m watching the Olympics I’m saying, “Wow, she’s not even close.” But I’m not laughing.

Go ahead and watch her Top 8 match against a dancer named “Fizzy.” You’ll be shocked at the difference between these dances and the ones she perpetrated at the Olympics. There’s an actual attempt to impress the judges, and the announcers themselves are impressed.

That leads one to ask an obvious question: Why, if she had the ability to actually breakdance, didn’t she put her best effort forward? That’s a great question isn’t it, and one that the broader media should be asking instead of fawning about her stories of hatred and spite. I have several theories:

• She got to Paris and realized she was going to look bad by comparison. I think this one’s a given, and it’s probably true in combination with one of the other theories. Breaking came toward the end of the Games, so Raygun undoubtedly got to see her competitors practicing their very athletic routines. I believe she changed things up to give herself a different angle.
• She thought that this was actually good breaking. This is the least defensible theory. There’s no way she could think that what she was doing would impress anyone, and her quotes since then seem to confirm that. Forget her claims of artistry – no one is buying that hopping around on a stage like a kangaroo someone qualifies as dancing brilliance.
• She’s not bright enough to know the difference between good and bad breaking. We’re talking about Dr. Rachael Gunn, a lecturer at Macquarie University Faculty of Arts. Her research has focused mainly on street culture, including breakdancing, so throw this one out of the window.
• She played the clown intentionally. This is where I’m resting. Take a look back at theory No. 1. If you know you have no chance of winning, you only have a couple of options. You can play it straight and go down in history as a pitiful, but genuine competitor. This has happened before. Just ask Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican Bobsled Team. In both of these cases, athletes who had no hope did their best and finished last – but they finished with their heads up. That wasn’t the case here. Rachael Gunn put on a show that she claims is artistic and creative, but that every other person in the world saw as a foolish clown show. If you’re a highly intelligent person who is keenly aware of what great breaking looks like, there’s only one reason to do this – attention.

That brings us back to what Ms. Gunn says is hatred. At the top of this, let me state that if anyone is spewing actual hatred or making death threats about Olympic breaking, those people need to be hunted down, captured and thrown into the deepest jail. There’s no excuse for that.

On the other hand, if people are doing what I suspect and merely saying how foolish and ridiculous Raygun looked, I fully support their right to do so. Rachael Gunn, as an expert in media and communications, should be fully aware that people who thrust themselves into the national or international spotlight have no real claim on privacy, especially when it comes to people’s assessment of their performance and ability. That should count even more for someone who claims to be an expert about street culture and breakdancing, and who then gets on the world’s largest and most visible stage to demonstrate what she says is a prime example of that culture.

In the words of former President Harry S. Truman, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Or in Raygun’s case, “If you don’t want to get broken, then don’t break.” Or something like that.

Now, back to Peacock. Why take down all of those breaking clips? What’s so special about breaking that NBC felt compelled to shield us from any evidence that it existed? My gut feeling tells me that most of the people watching the recaps weren’t doing it to see how cool the sport was but to see firsthand evidence of what they had been hearing about Raygun. And NBC, not wanting to be a party to so-called hatred, bowed to the pressure and pulled down every shred of proof of breaking at the Olympics, save for a clip of Snoop Dogg introducing the sport at the games. Watching Snoop walk around that circular venue was compelling stuff…

So Raygun, expert in street culture, used her “artistry” and “creativity” to ensure that no one would ever be able to see what it looked like once it reached the pinnacle of sports on a global stage. And then there’s the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. It’s already been reported that breaking will not be returning for those Games, though that decision had been made long before Ms. Gunn danced like a stapler or a kangaroo. Even so, it’s doubtful that those moves would have weighed in favor of the sport’s Olympic longevity.

As I stated at the start of this article, I don’t want to kick someone when they’re down, especially if they’re on the ground through no fault of their own. However, if they threw themself on the ground intentionally and then complained that people happened to notice, that’s an entirely different story. Hopefully Ms. Gunn will learn from this experience, wipe her tears and leave the breaking to dancers who won’t be so easily broken.

Copyright © 2024 Doug DeBolt.