Raygun clarifies whether she really is retiring from breakdancing: ‘Never used the word retire’

Australian breakdancer Rachael Gunn clarified that she’s not retiring from the sport after she said last week that she wouldn’t be participating in any more competitions.

Gunn, also known as “B-girl Raygun”, went viral on the internet almost overnight in August after she performed unusual moves at the 2024 Paris Olympics, including a kangaroo hop and a wriggle on the floor.

In an interview last week, she said the scrutiny and backlash over her performance at the Olympics resulted in her wanting to retire.

“I just didn’t have any control over how people saw me or who I was. I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems really difficult for me to do now,” she told local radio station 2DayFM. “I think the level of scrutiny that’s going to be there, and people will be filming it, and it will go online.”

“I still break but that’s like, in my living room with my partner,” she said.

However, in a new interview, she has now said she isn’t retiring and that her comments were taken out of context.

“It’s not a decision that I did come to, this turned into a story. So I was talking, you know, on 2dayFM about how I’m not going to do certain competitions anymore, which didn’t seem like such a big deal because breaking is not going to be in the Olympics any way,” she said on the Today show on Monday.

“But you know, I’m still going to be part of community jams, or I’d like to go to community jams and still dance and still break. I never used the word retire – I’m not retiring.

“You try and stop me, I’m not ever going to stop dancing so if you hear that again, you know that it’s not the truth,” she said.

She said breaking was a “lifestyle” and “you can’t retire from culture”.

“You can’t retire from an art form. So that’s why I’m never going to stop.”

The 37-year-old university lecturer from Sydney lost all three of her round-robin contests at the Olympics by a combined score of 54-0 and was ridiculed for her moves on social media.

Gunn’s performance led to a petition that called for an apology from the athlete as well as Australia’s Olympic chef de mission Anna Meares. The petition received over 50,000 signatures and derided Gunn and Meares for "attempting to gaslight the public and undermining the efforts of genuine athletes".

She described the response to her performance “devastating”.

“I’d really like to ask the press to please stop harassing my family, my friends, the Australian breaking community and the broader street dance community,” she said in an Instagram video at the time.

“Everyone has been through a lot as a result of this, so I ask you to please respect their privacy.”