Rachael “Raygun” Gunn is hanging up her tracksuit, at least professionally. The 37-year-old Australian B-Girl, a favorite during the Paris Olympics thanks to her unusual moves, confirmed that she will no longer participate in competitive breaking.
“I’m not going to compete anymore, no,” she said told radio station 2DayFm. “I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems a really difficult thing for me to do now, to approach a battle. I still dance and I still break but that’s like, in my living room with my partner.”
She explained that competitions had become too “upsetting” following the Olympic games, which made her a viral sensation. “I just didn’t have any control over how people saw me or who I was,” she said. “I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems really difficult for me to do now. I think the level of scrutiny that’s going to be there, and people will be filming it, and it will go online.”
She also addressed the slew of conspiracy theories that followed her appearance at the Olympics. Many people made claims that she wasn’t qualified for the high-level games and questioned how she was selected to compete with such an unorthodox approach.
“It’s still impossible to process,” Gunn said. “The conspiracy theories were totally wild, and it was really upsetting because I felt like I just didn’t have any control over how people saw me or who I was, who my partner was, my story.”
Still, Gunn admitted some positives have come from the attention that has come her way since the Olympics. She gets a lot of nice messages and Adele even described Gunn’s Olympics routine as “favorite thing” that happened during the games.
“That’s what gets me through, the people that are like, ‘You have inspired me to go out there and do something that I’ve been too shy to do, you’ve brought joy, you brought laughter, we’re so proud of you’,” Gunn said. “And just really frickin’ lovely things that people have written and that’s what I hold on to.”
In August, Gunn spoke out against the backlash in a video message on Instagram. “When I went out there I had fun. I did take it very seriously,” she said. “I worked my butt off preparing for the Olympics. I gave my all, truly. I am honored to have been a part of the Australian Olympic team and been a part of breaking’s Olympic debut.”
In September, the World DanceSport Federation declared Gunn the planet’s top B-girl. The federation explained that the scoring was based on “each athlete’s top four performances within the past 12 months” and that the Olympics and Olympic qualifiers don’t count. So even though Raygun hopped like a kangaroo in Paris and faced “devastating” scorn on social media and a merciless Rachel Dratch impression in the weeks that followed, she did pretty well at an official competition when other breakers were going for the gold.