PARIS — One by one, the breakers emerged in baggy pants and bandanas, crop-tops and durags, tracksuits and backwards caps, oversize T’s and classic hip-hop drip.
And then there was Rachael Gunn, B-girl Raygun, dressed in a standard Australian Olympian uniform, shirt tucked in like a 36-year-old college professor — because she is one.
“I didn’t get the memo,” Gunn told Yahoo Sports, “that we weren’t gonna rep our country colors. What’s going on there?”
She said that, and plenty else, with a wry smile. She was fully aware that she looked, seemed and was out of place. In a field stacked with world champions and dental brace-wearing teens, she was an outlier, a former ballroom dancer with a PhD in cultural studies and a day job at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Insane respect, got an all expenses paid trip to Paris plus all the free gear and is forever an Olympian. She cooked hard here I’m afraid pic.twitter.com/jHRHSUSpoz
— Katie (@medicinexthings) August 9, 2024
“Look, I came into the event kind of expecting that I wouldn’t get a vote,” she said.
And she didn’t, losing her three round-robin battles 18-0, 18-0, 18-0 as the women’s breaking competition got underway on Friday.
Instead, she leaned into her “unique style” — which many viewers interpreted, perhaps accurately, as a bit.
She swiped her very standard Aussie-green baseball cap. She skipped out to the stage, pumping her fist in the air. She flexed her muscles, and wiped the bottom of her granny-white sneakers. She slid across the floor with the grace of, well, a PE teacher. At one point, she flopped around like a fish.
“Look, everyone’s got a different style in breaking,” she said.
So, she did something akin to a crab-walk. She hit a not-quite-vertical handstand. She did some basic downrock breaking, but had nothing resembling the acrobatic power moves that her competitors had.
“My style is not as suited to these events,” she said. “You can see the dynamics, and a lot of really quick footwork, and power moves, and freezes, and things like that.”
But she was pretty darn good for a woman who didn’t take up breaking until her mid-20s, via her husband. Pretty good for someone from Australia, not exactly a hip-hop hub. She qualified because she was the best in Oceania.
“I’ve never performed on a stage that big,” she said. “We don’t have events that big in Australia.”
And she is far from a full-time breaker, like some of the other Olympians are. She spends most of her time lecturing and researching dance, gender politics and the “dynamics between theoretical and practical methodologies,” according to her bio on the Olympics website.
So she was beaming after six rounds of breaking, even after exiting the competition without a vote.
“It was amazing. Such an amazing experience,” she told Yahoo Sports outside the venue at La Concorde. “What a stage, what an arena, what a crowd. Music was great. Like, hh, so, so grateful for the opportunity.”
Source Agencies
