Rachael Gunn, the Australian breaker known as “Raygun” on stage, still feels like she’s in a dream, three weeks after her Olympic performance sparked positive and negative reaction.
“I’ll survive. I’m all right,” she told “The Project” in a video posted Wednesday, two days after her 37th birthday. “The positives are just amazing. I would rather much focus on the positives out of this and the positive responses and the joy that I’ve brought people.”
On Aug. 9, Gunn placed 16th out of 16 women in breaking’s Olympic debut (a 17th, Manizha Talash of the Refugee Olympic Team, was disqualified).
“As soon as I finished my rounds, my media liaison from the AOC (Australian Olympic Committee), said, ‘Oh, there’s a bit of a storm brewing on social media. You might want to go off socials,’” Gunn said. “And I was like, oh, OK. I didn’t understand the scale of it. And then I did preview some comments, and I was like, oh no. This kind of sick feeling started coming out. I was like, oh goodness. What has happened?”
Gunn said she was chased while out in public, which put her in a state of panic. She received mental health support quickly after her competition.
She also became aware of what she called pretty alarming vitriol among the reactions. Focusing on the positives, Gunn was appreciative of head judge Martin Gilian’s supportive comments.
"(Gilian) came out and explained that in the breaking community, what I did actually wasn’t very shocking,” she said. “It’s just a different approach in breaking. You have the athletic style breakers, you also have the more artistic style breakers, and all of them are very valid.”
She has yet to watch full video of her Olympic performance.
“That’s not unusual for me,” she said. “I’m not great at watching back my battles immediately. ... I think I’ve seen little bits and pieces, but, yeah, I’ll watch it eventually.”
Gunn looks forward to breaking again but doesn’t have plans to compete for a while. Breaking will not be on the Olympic program at the next Games in 2028 in Los Angeles.
“Not really wanting to be in the spotlight, breaking, competing,” she said. “It’s been a bit of a process to try and start dancing again. Like, that’s actually been tough. It was my medicine, and then it turned into my source of stress. So I’m really happy that it gets to go back to being my medicine. I can kind of finally feel free again.”