Australian breakdancer Raygun is lampooned in a new musical but the Olympics fiasco was no comedy | Lyndsey Winship

Rachael Gunn’s disastrous summer at the Paris Games in 2024 has inspired a silly show about ‘Spraygun’ but its jibes are unfairEveryone can have a bad day at the office. But for most of us, it doesn’t take place in front of millions of viewers at the world’s biggest sporting event. 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. A version of the show was cancelled in Sydney in December after receiving notice from Gunn’s lawyers. As Broadbridge told the New York Times, the jokes then got meaner, legal action became part of the show, the protagonist’s name became Spraygun and they called it fiction. It’s a very silly and not unentertaining show (especially, I imagine, if you are Australian – there are a fair few niche jokes), but I did feel sorry for Gunn. Spraygun is painted as an entitled rich girl who is deluded thinking she could get to the Olympics, cheats her way into the squad and robs Australia of its dignity in front of the rest of the world.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. The Oceania B-girl scene is clearly not as developed as other regions worldwide in large part because if its size (only 0.6% of the global population.) So, yes, she was lucky, and better breakers from all over the world missed out, but it wasn’t Gunn’s fault. It’s also worth saying there are fantastic dancers who don’t believe in breaking as a sport and may not have entered anyway. (No dancers from the UK qualified, male or female.) Continue reading...

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