It had never happened before, and it may never happen again. At the final of the Breaking Oceania Championships at the Sydney town hall in October, the best B-Boy and B-Girl were to be selected as Australia’s representatives for breaking’s Olympic debut in Paris.
Just weeks before, Los Angeles 2028 Games officials chose to jettison the sport from its program. It meant this tournament presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for two Australian breakers to go to the Olympics.
Many expected the face of Australian breaking, a woman known for her confidence, style and masterly routines, would claim one of the precious places. But after qualifying for the finals, the B-Girl – known as Raygun – woke up with a headache.
“I was exhausted and I had to fight every step of the way, all day,” she says. “Thinking about it, it’s triggering – it’s the hardest thing I’ve done.”
Outside the breaking community, Raygun is Dr Rachael Gunn. In her mid-30s, white and an academic from suburban Sydney.
The contrast of those attributes with breaking culture – with roots in hip-hop emerging from disadvantaged parts of the US – has made her irresistible for the Australian media. So in 2020, when breaking was announced as a sport in the Paris Olympics, Gunn’s life changed.
“I woke up and I had a voicemail from the ABC at seven o’clock in the morning,” she says. “I probably did a dozen interviews, but back then the thing that would make it into the news was, ‘it’s exciting.’ There wasn’t much depth beyond that, because at that point, everyone thought it was a joke.”
Breaking emerged in the 1970s among African American and Puerto Rican communities in New York. The culture – rich in protest and expression – transcends the visually distinctive spins and freezes.
It has “its own knowledge, language and hierarchies,” says a 2012 paper presented by Gunn at a University of Newcastle conference on her way to a PhD. With her decade of academic study – and string of breaking accolades – few were better placed to promote the sport in its moment in the spotlight than the freshly minted Dr Gunn.
She does it tirelessly but with some reluctance. Gunn admits she sometimes feels “icky” about what she has become. “This educated white girl who had a suburban upbringing, as the representative for breaking – given its origins and given its reach, particularly in more disadvantaged communities,” she says. “But I try to use that position to advocate as much as possible for breaking.”
A young Gunn gained a taste for dance and performance in her childhood, doing ballroom then progressing into jazz and tap. She played some sport, but was always drawn back to movement and music.
Two pivotal moments paved her path to Paris. Working at a call centre during university she met Samuel Free. They shared a passion for dance, and “within a couple of months we were together,” she says.
B-Boy Sammy The Free would compete at breaking events. Gunn came to watch her then boyfriend in these judged battles, interspersed by informal dance circles known as “cyphers”. At one Melbourne meet in 2011, Gunn was struck by fate again.
“There was a girl there and she got down in the cypher and I was like, ‘oh my gosh, that’s so cool,’” she says. “Like, I knew that there were other girls that breaked, I just hadn’t seen anyone in person … afterwards I said to Sammy, ‘I’m going to train.’”
Breaking had some things in common with the styles of dance Gunn knew – from ballroom to contemporary – but it was still a radical adjustment. “There were times that I would go into the bathroom crying because I was so embarrassed at how terrible I was at this,” she says.
She paused her new pursuit while concluding her PhD, but after a break Gunn applied herself with a renewed focus, starting with a high-profile B-Girl competition in 2018. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna train this, I’m gonna try, I’m gonna go really far,’” she says. But the contest didn’t go to plan. “I got knocked out in the top eight.
“Sammy was like, ‘you didn’t really train hard enough though, you’ve just got to get better.’” It sounded harsh, but Gunn knew he was right.
In breaking, judges assess formal categories of creativity, performance, variety, musicality and personality across largely one-on-one battles. The scoring system allows athletes to tackle the competition with their own approaches. “Technical is a good way to describe me,” Gunn says. “‘Creative’ and ‘style’, I think are my strengths.”
But the sport has undergone a transformation as it aligns itself to the Olympic movement. Open competitions, with B-Boys and B-Girls, had been a staple of the breaking scene. The decision to split high-level competition into gendered contests has had negative consequences.
“We were just starting to see more gender-diverse people in breaking as well,” Gunn says. “Things like that have a real impact on who feels like breaking is a space for them.” She also believes there is now more focus on point-scoring rather than expression – “like a rubric, ticking boxes”.
In Paris, there won’t be the same music as a typical jam in Sydney. The breakers’ looks will be homogenised by the official apparel partners. It will, Gunn predicts, be a different kind of breaking.
“You lose that direct connection with hip-hop culture,” she says. “There’s also certain moves that we can’t do, certain burns [gestures] that are not allowed in the Olympics. And I’ve been told that we can’t trash talk, which is going to be extra hard for me. So there is that rawness that’s going to be lost.”
The decision to include breaking in Paris is partly in order for the Olympics to stay relevant to younger audiences and attract new fans. “We are essentially being used to up the Olympic ratings,” Gunn says matter-of-factly. But she believes these are sacrifices the Australian breaking community is prepared to make.
“I always thought breaking was … steeped in protest, this space for people to reject mainstream culture. But I’ve talked to so many breakers around Australia and I don’t get that from them. They just enjoy breaking and, actually, they want it to be legitimised.”
Gunn has devoted much of her professional and personal life to the pursuit. From her 20s into her 30s, from one competition to the next, she continued to improve. Away from lecturing undergraduates on visual culture, she relished finding the limits of her body, and then pushing past them, building confidence with each breaking victory.
That self-assurance – so vital in the semi-scripted contests of breaking – made her heavily favoured at the town hall last October.
Yet two days of competition, building all the time towards that decisive final, tested Gunn to her limit. Raygun, with her aching head, and her lagging limbs, finally prevailed – narrowly – against Holy Molly, a teenager from Wollongong.
Gunn had booked her ticket to Paris, but her performance was not without fluffed moves and missed cues. “Nobody knew except Sammy,” she says. “I turned to him at the end of the final and I was like, ‘what do you think?’ and he’s like …”
Mimicking her husband’s face, she offers a look that says, “you got very lucky”. Then Australia’s best breaker starts laughing.
“I was so slow because I was so tired, my body just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do,” she says. “But I had to act like … it was all part of the plan.”