Rachael Gunn, known as B-girl Raygun, scored nul points for Australia at the Paris 2024 Olympics with a routine finished by a kangaroo hop. Social media response included heavy criticism of her dancing and sexist attacks aimed at a woman in the public eye. A year later a Fringe comedy, Breaking the Musical, staged a depiction of the incident that some view as cruel. A Sydney performance was cancelled after legal notice from Gunn's lawyers. The show's creator reworked the piece, renaming the protagonist Spraygun and framing the material as fiction. Selection rules allowed a continental slot that brought Gunn onto the squad.
Such was the lot of Rachael Gunn, AKA B-girl Raygun, who scored a memorable nul points for Australia at the Paris Olympics in 2024 with her routine topped off with a kangaroo hop. Gunn was pilloried on social media, partly over the quality of her dance (more on that later), but mostly just the usual sexist guff directed at any woman in the public eye deemed to be in the wrong.
A year later, the pile-on continues: this time in musical theatre form at Breaking the Musical, an Edinburgh fringe comedy that is either a funny bit of bants or a cruel character assassination, depending on your point of view. The cardinal sin Gunn appears to have committed in Aussie comedian and writer Steph Broadbridge's eyes is not being able to laugh at herself.
One rumour at the time was that Gunn's husband had been on the selection panel but that's not true. The way the overall selection process was designed, there were spots for the hosts, world championship winners and top dancers from a series of qualifying competitions, plus one from each continent's own championship, which is how Gunn got on the squad.
Collection
[
|
...
]