Raygun: the Kangaroo That Got Judged

When Breaking made its Olympic debut in 2024, I watched Rachael Gunn — better known as Raygun — represent Australia after winning the Oceania qualifiers. I was genuinely excited. I knew nothing about her, and on paper the field looked competitive.

READ THE BFG INTERVIEW WITH RAYGUN / RACHAEL GUNN HERE

Then the first round happened at Place de la Concorde in Paris. The crowd was expectant, the atmosphere thick with that raw street-breaking energy. Snoop Dogg opened the event with the traditional coup de bâton, striking the baton three times to signal the start, one of the many who would go on to witness the coming disaster. Her American opponent opened with a clean, competent set. Raygun followed, dressed head-to-toe in the full Australian tracksuit.

She had swagger, of a kind — but an awkward, almost apologetic swagger that didn’t even reach the level of an orphaned poodle. She delivered a performance that can only be described as bewildering. Zero points. The second round was somehow worse. In the third she faced Dominika Banevič (Nicka) of Lithuania, one of the best in the world and eventual silver medalist. That was when the kangaroo hop, the sprinkler, the swimming motion and the cobra made their appearance. I sat there thinking: what am I actually watching?

At that precise moment I felt a pure, almost religious rage. This woman, I decided, was mocking the Olympic movement. She was turning the sacrifice of real athletes into a joke. She deserved to be publicly crucified. And when the entire internet turned her into a meme and subjected her to industrial-strength bullying, I felt a deep, shameful satisfaction. “You’re not getting away with this,” I thought. “On this planet everything gets paid for — even in Olympic breaking.”

Then the conspiracy theories of all sizes arrived: her husband Sammy had somehow fixed the qualifiers, there was a dark hand behind it all, the Illuminati were using breaking to soften our brains for the new world order. When I learned that Netflix was releasing a documentary directed by the same brothers who made Wild Wild Country, I thought: finally. Finally someone is going to expose her.

I sat down on release day ready to savor the final act of my personal revenge. The opening minutes showed internet strangers laughing at her with real cruelty. “You’re not getting away with this,” I muttered again. But the documentary kept going, and something unexpected happened: even her own family was laughing at the whole mess. Slowly, almost against my will, I started to meet Rachael and her husband Sammy (original breaker name: Sammy Sex). I listened to other Australian B-girls. And I realised the conspiracies were nonsense. The Australian breaking scene was small, passionate, intense — and technically nowhere near world level. Rachael had won the Oceania qualifiers fairly. She was simply the best of a, shall we say, modest field.

For the first time a different thought appeared: the real culprit was the Olympic Committee. When you open the Games to a brand-new discipline, you get the best athlete each country can offer, even if that “best” is not remotely ready for the global stage. My anger began to dissolve. I started laughing with her instead of at her. Rachael always knew she wasn’t at the required level. She just wanted to go anyway. If someone offered me the absurd chance to compete in Olympic chess representing a country where we play for fun and beer, and I suddenly drew Magnus Carlsen in the first round, I would still go. And I would probably move the knight backwards out of pure survival instinct.

Untold: Raygun: Breaking Badly, directed with almost Kubrickian precision by Chapman and Maclain Way, turns this real-life absurdity into something that sits comfortably next to Christopher Guest’s actual mockumentaries (Best in Show) or Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams’ Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. It has exactly their atmosphere: Rachael lost in the Olympic Village, having a panic attack, is the spiritual cousin of the Spinal Tap musicians wandering the corridors looking for the stage door. It is a near-perfect demonstration of what happens when ordinary people are suddenly dropped into extraordinary, ridiculous situations.

One of the documentary’s quiet triumphs is that the directors simply did their job. The visuals are strong, intimate, beautifully lit, with graffiti-style titles that appear only when needed. There is no obvious bias. Unlike so many modern documentaries that gently (or not so gently) shove the story in a preferred direction, here Rachael’s story is so preposterous that simply telling it straight was enough. The Way brothers wisely stepped back and let the story break.

As the film progresses we are taken, almost surgically, almost microscopically, through the journey of an ordinary person from complete normality to the pure abnormality of standing on an Olympic stage. We watch the obstacles pile up: she was never at true international competitive level; the Australian Olympic Committee, according to both Rachael and Sammy, provided essentially zero meaningful support — no proper funding, no real follow-up; her official coach barely looked at the routines she was preparing. Nobody was watching her. She simply did the best she could with what she had.

We are also invited into her psychology and the small bubble of people around her. It becomes a surprisingly rich study of what happens when a regular human being is thrown, without a safety net, into the global circus. I have seen the fresh wave of haters still attacking her with 2024-level intensity. I have watched body-language “experts” dissect every frame. And while watching them I felt, for a moment, something close to what she must have felt: what the fuck do they think she did? What exact crime do these people believe this woman committed to deserve the kind of moral scrutiny usually reserved for child abusers?

Our hypocritical age claims to embrace difference, but only actually embraces it in pre-approved forms. When someone dares step into the limelight from the wrong place in an awkward, unauthorized way, the self-proclaimed social police yell that the social contract is being broken. This documentary, however, quietly grants individuals the possibility of dignity despite those loudly-enforced, but monomaniacal rules.

Gunn holds a PhD focused on gender in Sydney’s breaking scene. She is intellectually sharp. That did not make her an elite Olympic athlete, but it did mean she understood, at least in theory, the cultural space she was entering. Everyone in her circle — including her — knew she was going to be destroyed. The media, meanwhile, kept asking her about medals. The perfect storm assembled itself: an uninvolved official coach, an absent Olympic committee, and a woman feeling the pressure build with nowhere to put it.

There is also a strange and sweet love story between Rachael and Sammy. He holds an almost blind love for her — the kind that refuses to see defects (even when they are obvious to the entire world) and instead invents small possibilities of grace. The film leans heavily on their shared charisma and their almost childlike sincerity. When she decided to throw in the kangaroo, the sprinkler and the rest, it was not mockery. It was a clumsy, heartfelt homage to Australia. A personal “I’m going down in a blaze of glory.”

In the end the documentary feels like Rocky in reverse. Rocky gives everything against Apollo Creed, loses the decision, and still wins the crowd. Rachael also gave everything she had. She trained with genuine intensity in the final months. She could not do more. Unlike Rocky, she received no ovation — she was crushed. And yet, in some sideways way, she won. Somewhere in the world someone is still doing the kangaroo hop. She has a Netflix documentary. And not long after the Games, Sir Richard Branson himself reached out, invited her (and Sammy) onto one of his Virgin Voyages cruises in the Mediterranean, and even attempted the kangaroo hop beside her. Not everyone was a hater. When a billionaire who founded an empire decides you deserve a morale-boosting cruise, that counts as another kind of medal.

That, against all odds and against all my earlier wishes, is a kind of victory.

Read the Book and Film Globe interview with Raygun / Rachael Gunn here.