Australian breaker Rachael Gunn has retired from competitive breaking due to the scrutiny she received following her performance at the Paris Olympics.
The 37-year-old became one of the defining athletes of the 2024 Games and her performance in the new discipline was a viral sensation, triggering some support but wider ridicule.
The sport has been dropped from the Olympics programme for Los Angeles Games in 2028, but Gunn said she will also step away from local competition.
“I was going to keep competing, for sure, but that seems a really difficult thing for me to do now, to approach a battle,” she said on 2DayFm on Wednesday. “I still dance and I still break but that’s like, in my living room with my partner.”
Although Gunn failed to progress past the first round of competition in Paris, her routines – which included a kangaroo hop and the sprinkler – became social media fodder.
The Australian’s profile exploded, and conspiracy theories emerged about how she qualified for the Olympics. She said the response was “really upsetting”.
“It’s still impossible to process, 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.”
Through the negativity, there were also positives. Her performance was described by singer Adele midway through a concert in Munich during the Games as her “favourite thing that has happened in the Olympics”.
Gunn also met Sir Richard Branson, has featured in glossy magazines since her return to Australia and is currently featuring in an online promotion for a comparison website.
But while her profile has grown, she now feels she can’t compete within the burgeoning competitive Australian breaking scene.
“The level of scrutiny that’s going to be there and people will be filming it and it will go online, and it’s just not going to mean the same thing, it’s not going to be the same experience because of everything that’s at stake,” she said.
Gunn qualified for the Games by winning the 2023 Oceania Championships in Sydney, and due to a quirk in the calculation of rankings was even named the top-ranked female athlete in the sport in September.
That news came soon after Games, and prompted another wave of online vitriol. Gunn said she has tried to stay upbeat, and keeps a folder of positive messages.
“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’,” she said. “And just really frickin’ lovely things that people have written and that’s what I hold on to.”
