That Olympic break dancer everyone laughed at? She just became the World No. 1.
PARIS—For 17 days this summer, the Paris Olympics turned into a factory of indelible images: Stephen Curry raining 3-pointers, Simone Biles soaring to gymnastics gold, and Celine Dion belting out hits on the Eiffel Tower. But nothing went more viral than a brief clip of an Australian woman who went by the name Raygun twisting around on the floor. Rachael Gunn, as it says on her passport, was the break dancer whose performance launched a thousand memes and earned her exactly zero votes from the judges the whole time she was in Paris.
But it also paved the way for something else. A month after the Games, Raygun is now the No. 1 breaker in the world.
This might seem like an egregious mistake to anybody who actually watched breaking’s Olympic debut—or to the millions who didn’t but caught the clips that set the internet on fire. Raygun, a college lecturer in Sydney who focuses on “the cultural politics of breaking," lost her three dance-offs, or battles, by a combined score of 54-0. Except this isn’t some kind of prank.
Instead, her rise to the top is explained by the esoteric rules of the little-known World DanceSport Federation, which felt compelled to issue a lengthy statement this week explaining how Raygun really became the top-ranked breaker. According to the WDSF’s Breaking Rules and Regulations Manual, the standings are based on athletes’ top four performances over the previous 12 months. And last October, Raygun earned a whole raft of points when she claimed first place at the Oceania Continental Championships.
Since then, those points have only become more valuable. That’s because there haven’t been any chances for breakers to accumulate them for most of the past year. From the start of 2024 through the Paris
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