For Australia’s B-girls, it’s been a tough 72 hours. As Rachael “Raygun” Gunn went viral after her performance at the Paris Olympics, the tight-knit breaking community at home has been dealing with the fallout.
“It’s really affected us. We’ve got B-girls in tears about it,” says Leah Clark, who has been a B-girl for the last 24 years and runs a dance performance space in Brisbane.
“How do I go to work now and try to get our sponsorship and get our grant money for breaking programs [for a sport] that’s just been made a mockery of? And how do we go and represent our country at other world level events when Australia’s been made a fool of? … This is actually affecting us on a much larger scale than just memes.”
While much of the global reaction to Gunn’s performance has been jovial or supportive, with Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese praising the cultural studies academic for having “a crack”, there have also been darker elements.
Clark says she has been trolled online and has received prank phone calls at work. Many Australian B-girls have had to switch their social media accounts to private to dodge the hate; others have posted online about feeling despair over breaking’s depiction on the world stage.
Those in the Australian street dance community describe Gunn as a respected member of the local scene – but say her performance at the Olympics doesn’t represent the standard of breaking in Australia.
“We feel for Rachael, and we hope that she’s OK with the hate that she’s getting, but at the same time, we’re disappointed,” says Clark.
Gunn received zero points during the Olympics competition, though top judge Martin Gilian told the media later this was indicative of a competitive system: “Breaking is all about originality and bringing something new to the table … and this is exactly what Raygun was doing.”
B-girls say Gunn won her spot in the Olympics fair and square. But they also report that the qualifying process was flawed and locked out many of the country’s best talents.
“I think there’s a bigger conversation [needed] here around the system and how it’s being built,” says Catherine Tsang, who competed as B-girl Cat for many years but is now semi-retired.
Clark says there were a number of technical factors that stopped many of Australia’s best B-girls from trying out for the Olympics. The Oceania qualifying event in Sydney in 2023 “was a really quick turnaround”, with little lead time between the announcement and the event itself. Participants had to register with three different bodies to compete and had to have a valid passport, which Clark says many B-girls didn’t – nor did they want to shell out hundreds of dollars for one to be issued. All of this resulted in poorly attended qualifiers.
“There wasn’t even enough B-girls to [fill] the top 16,” she says.
Guardian Australia contacted Dance Sports Australia, the Olympic Press Office and the World Dance Sports Federation for comment but did not receive a response.
Koh Yamada, a respected name in the dance community who does breaking as well as other styles, says that citizenship is another issue that stopped many of Australia’s best breaking talents from competing in the Olympic qualifiers. Despite having won many national street dance competitions in recent years, Yamada opted not to compete for the Olympics because he doesn’t have Australian citizenship – only permanent residency.
“I do also know that there are many B-girls in Australia that didn’t [compete], and probably for similar reasons,” he says.
While street dance in general in Australia is a healthy scene, in Australia it remains male-dominated, with far fewer B-girls here than abroad – Clark says there are only about 30 to 50 competitive B-girls across Australia. The small size of the scene has made the volume of international attention over the past few days all the more intense.
“It’s been a lot and overwhelming for a lot of the B-girls on the scene, because we’ve never had this type of exposure before,” Tsang says.
after newsletter promotion
Tsang has a more hopeful take than Clark on what that attention may mean for the future of the scene: “It’s brought a lot of us together, and, hopefully this also provides a stage for us to uplift the B-girl scene here … and drive the culture up a little bit more.”
But she, like Clark and Yamada, is frustrated that Gunn’s viral moment has taken attention away from more positive stories for the sport.
“It’s just devastating to see how far it’s gone,” says Yamada.
“No one’s really paying attention to the medallists that won within the B-girls category. I also think it was amazing to see the Afghan refugee being able to participate in the B-girls category. I don’t hear anyone talking about that, and I don’t think people even know that that happened.”
For Clark, it’s saddening that the strong performance of Australia’s B-boy Olympic competitor, 16-year-old Jeff ‘J-Attack’ Dunne, has been overshadowed.
“Jeff is 16 years old, and he was competing against men in their 30s who had decades of experience over him. He qualified, and he represented so strong,” Clark says. “Like, you can just imagine the pressure that was on a 16-year-old after what happened the day before.”
Now, Clark hopes Gunn, whom she counts as a friend, is feeling OK – and that the world gets a chance to see the true talent in the Australian breaking scene soon.
“We obviously care for her and hope she’s OK, because no one deserves the stuff that’s going on with her, not right now – it’s damaging and it’s dangerous,” she says.
“We need support, and we need people to come and see our events and see what breaking is really like, and what our amazing community is … the mockery needs to stop, because it doesn’t reflect us.”