I recently watched Netflix’s *Untold: Raygun – Breaking Badly*, and I came away thinking far less about Rachael Gunn’s individual performance than I did about something much bigger.
Power.
Shortly afterwards, I came across a post from Wundirra on Instagram that put words around some of what I had been thinking.
Their post said: “Raygun is the example. The conversation is much bigger.”
And I think that is exactly where this conversation needs to go.
I don’t particularly want to write another article debating whether Raygun was a “good” or “bad” breaker. Nor do I want to contribute to the extraordinary personal abuse that was directed towards her after the Paris Olympics.
But I do want to ask some uncomfortable questions about Australia.
Because Raygun’s story gives us an opportunity to examine privilege, access, expertise, institutional power and the difference between giving everyone the same opportunity and creating genuine equity.
And perhaps the most important question isn’t whether Raygun deserved to go to the Olympics.
Perhaps it is: Who else never had a realistic opportunity to get there? Or, this was the Olympics. Is “doing your best” enough?
One of the narratives that emerged following Raygun’s performance was that she got out there, gave it a go, represented her country and did her best.
On a human level, I understand that sentiment. But this wasn’t a school carnival. This was the Olympic Games. We are allowed to expect excellence from people selected to represent Australia at the highest level of international competition.
That doesn’t mean Raygun cheated her way there. She didn’t.
She legitimately won the 2023 Oceania qualifier. Fellow Australian breaker Lucas Marie has said she won her qualification “fair and square”. So this isn’t about taking her qualification away from her retrospectively.
It’s about asking a different question: Did the system that selected our Olympic representative ensure that Australia’s strongest talent had the best possible opportunity to reach the selection process?
Those aren’t the same thing.
A Fair Competition Can Exist Inside an Unequal System
This is where conversations about equity become important. We tend to measure fairness by looking at what happens once everyone arrives at the starting line.
- Were the rules the same?
- Were competitors judged using the same criteria?
- Could anybody enter?
If the answer is yes, we declare the process fair. But equity asks us to go further back.
Who could actually get to the starting line?
ABC asked Lucas Marie whether there could have been talented B-girls in places such as Perth, regional Victoria or rural Queensland who had the ability to qualify but couldn’t afford to travel to Sydney.
He acknowledged that this was possible. That seemingly small detail changes the conversation considerably. Because an opportunity being open doesn’t make it accessible.
Imagine an extraordinarily talented young breaker living in regional or remote Australia.
- Who pays for their flight to Sydney?
- Their accommodation?
- Registration?
- Who covers the shifts they miss at work?
- What if they have children?
- What if they’re 16 and their parent needs to travel with them?
- Who tells them that the qualifier even exists?
- Who explains how an emerging Olympic qualification system works?
- Who identifies their talent?
- Who connects the grassroots breaking community they belong to with a newly formalised international sporting system?
Suddenly, “anyone could enter” doesn’t sound quite the same.
I had seen Aboriginal breaking in my teens.
I had a friend who was learning to breakdance under the mentorship of B-boy Scott Thompson at the Block in Redfern.
At the time, breaking wasn’t an Olympic sport. It was simply something happening within community. Young people were dancing, battling, learning from one another and being mentored by people already established in the scene.
Watching the Raygun documentary made me think about that again, so I went looking, and I found Scott’s name.
In 2010, Deadly Vibe profiled Indigenous breaker Isaac Parsons, known as B-boy 2Ezy. 2Ezy had won the 2009 Deadly Award for Best Dancer and was part of All Consciousness Crew, which had won a national breaking title.
And there in his story was Scott Thompson.
After moving to Sydney, 2Ezy met Scott while Scott was running breaking workshops at the Block in Redfern. Scott subsequently introduced him to All Consciousness Crew.
But what struck me most wasn’t what they achieved themselves. It was what they did next.
The Talent Was Already There
Scott and 2Ezy began mentoring Aboriginal children from Redfern and Waterloo. Together they resurrected the Redfern City Rockers, described by 2Ezy as one of the early Aboriginal crews in the breaking scene. The kids they were working with ranged from around six to fourteen years old.
Think about that. This was 2010.
Fourteen years before breaking appeared at the Paris Olympics, Aboriginal kids in inner-city Sydney were already being deliberately mentored into breaking by people connected to Australia’s competitive breaking scene.
And 2Ezy wasn’t simply hoping to develop himself. He talked about wanting more Aboriginal breakers coming through and dreamed of seeing an all-Indigenous crew win national championships.
This is important.
Because when I ask “Where were our First Nations breakers?”, I’m not suggesting I know of a particular Aboriginal woman who should have gone to Paris instead of Raygun.
I don’t.
Making that claim without evidence would simply replace one assumption with another. I’m asking something much more interesting:
What happened to the pipeline?
Where were those six-year-olds by 2024? What happened to the generations that followed them? How connected was the newly created Olympic pathway to the grassroots breaking communities that had existed for decades? How much investment went into finding and developing talent within those communities?
And how much responsibility was placed on individual dancers to find their own way into the system?
Breaking Didn’t Begin With an Institution
This is where the Wundirra post pushed my thinking further. They wrote about a familiar pattern:
“Communities create something. Institutions discover its value. People with greater access learn how to move through it.”
Breaking itself emerged from Black and Latino communities in the Bronx. It didn’t begin inside a university. It wasn’t invented by an Olympic committee. It didn’t come from a sporting institute deciding the world needed another competitive event.
It came from community. And then institutions discovered its value.
Breaking eventually reached the Olympic Games, where it appeared for the first time in Paris in 2024.
Yet Australia’s competitive pathway remained relatively shallow, particularly for women. Commentary at the time pointed to limited pathways and financial support for getting people into qualifying competitions.
That’s worth thinking about.
Because what happens when an institution takes a community-created cultural practice and formalises it? Who understands the new system? Who has the resources to navigate it? Who gets credentials? Who gets recognised as an expert? Who gets funded? Who gets selected?
And who becomes invisible?
Privilege isn’t the same as cheating
This is an important distinction. Talking about privilege does not mean saying Raygun cheated. She qualified legitimately. Nor does privilege mean someone doesn’t work hard. Privilege often looks much less dramatic than that.
It can be living close enough to attend an event. Having money for an airfare. Having flexible employment. Being comfortable navigating institutions. Knowing which competitions matter. Having professional networks. Understanding application processes. Having access to information. Having the confidence to put yourself forward. Being able to spend years developing a passion that doesn’t necessarily generate an income.
Having someone beside you saying, You belong here. Enter.
None of those things makes someone a bad person. But they influence who gets through the door.
And that is why equality and equity aren’t interchangeable.
Equality says: The competition is open to everyone.
Equity asks: Does everyone actually have a reasonable opportunity to get there?
Who Gets Believed as an Expert?
Another question Wundirra raised really stayed with me: Who gets believed as an expert?
This question extends well beyond Raygun. It is something I encounter constantly in Aboriginal education. Communities can hold knowledge for generations.
People can live something. Teach it. Practise it. Protect it. Pass it between generations.
Then someone from outside that community studies it, learns the language valued by institutions, writes about it, gains qualifications and suddenly becomes recognised as an expert in something the community has always known.
This doesn’t mean academics shouldn’t conduct research. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t learn outside their own cultures. It means we should always be conscious of who gets centred through that process.
- Whose knowledge becomes valuable once an institution validates it?
- Who gets the job?
- Who gets published?
- Who gets invited onto the panel?
- Who gets interviewed?
- Who becomes the spokesperson?
- And who remains “community”?
These are questions about power.
And Then Raygun Became the Story
Two years after Paris, we now have a documentary. Again, Raygun absolutely has the right to tell her story. The global ridicule and abuse directed towards her was enormous. The documentary describes the personal consequences of becoming a worldwide meme virtually overnight. But two things can be true simultaneously.
Raygun did not deserve abuse.
And: We can question why Raygun continues to occupy so much of the cultural space surrounding Olympic breaking.
That tension isn’t just something outsiders have noticed.
The Washington Post recently spoke with Olympic breakers frustrated that Raygun continues to dominate the story of breaking at Paris. American bronze medallist Victor Montalvo said he declined an invitation to participate in the documentary because he feared the other Olympic dancers would again be overlooked.
That’s fascinating to me. Because the athlete who didn’t win a medal became arguably the most recognisable face of Olympic breaking. Then her experience of becoming that face became another story. And another platform.
Meanwhile, how many Australians could name the women who actually stood on the podium? Again, that isn’t necessarily Raygun’s fault.
But it is worth examining the system that determines whose story gets amplified.
“Open the Door, Don’t Stand in it”
Perhaps my favourite idea from the Wundirra post was their reflection that sometimes being an ally, researcher, practitioner, artist or advocate requires recognising that access should be used to “open the door, not position yourself in the doorway.”
That sentence has applications far beyond breaking. What does it mean to participate in something without taking over? To learn without claiming ownership? To develop expertise while continuing to centre the people whose lived and cultural knowledge made our learning possible? To use our networks to create opportunities for people who don’t have those networks? To recognise when our job isn’t to take the microphone, but to pass it?
That, to me, is what meaningful allyship should continually ask of us.
So What Would Equity Have Looked Like?
If Australia genuinely wanted to find its strongest breaking talent, simply advertising a qualifier wasn’t enough.
An equitable pathway might have required regional qualifiers, travel and accommodation funding, community talent identification, investment in grassroots breaking programs, mentoring, partnerships with Aboriginal organisations and existing hip-hop communities, culturally safe pathways and deliberate outreach to places where breaking was already happening.
And crucially, it would require asking communities: What is stopping your dancers from getting here?
Rather than designing a system and then wondering why certain people aren’t participating in it. Because sometimes the absence of marginalised people from an opportunity doesn’t indicate an absence of talent. Sometimes it tells us something about the opportunity.
This is much bigger than Raygun
Perhaps that’s why this story has stayed with me. Because I work in early childhood education, and I see versions of this pattern everywhere.
We establish a committee and say Aboriginal people are welcome to join. We advertise a position and say Aboriginal people are encouraged to apply. We organise professional development and say everyone is welcome. We create a consultation process and say everyone had an opportunity to contribute.
And then we look around the room and wonder why the same people continue to hold the microphone.
Inviting everyone into an unequal system doesn’t automatically make that system equitable.
Sometimes we have to change the system. And sometimes we need to stop measuring inclusion by the openness of the door and start looking at the road people need to travel to reach it. That’s what I keep coming back to when I think about those kids breaking at the Block in Redfern.
The talent existed.
The culture existed.
The mentors existed.
Aboriginal breakers were winning awards and national competitions. Aboriginal kids were being mentored into the next generation. Long before breaking became useful to an international sporting institution, community was already doing the work.
So I’m not particularly interested in spending another two years debating the kangaroo hop.
I’m interested in the Aboriginal kid who could dance but couldn’t afford the airfare. The regional breaker who never heard about the qualifier. The community practitioner whose decades of knowledge never became a credential. The person who didn’t have the networks. The person who wasn’t identified. The person who wasn’t funded. The person who never got into the room.
Because perhaps the most useful question to come from Untold: Raygun – Breaking Badly isn’t:
Did Raygun deserve to be there?
Perhaps it is:
Who else deserved the opportunity to try, and what would we have needed to change to make sure they actually got it?
Because an open door means very little when some people have a highway leading directly to it and others don’t even have a road.
And that isn’t just a conversation about breaking.
It’s a conversation about power.
Acknowledgement: This reflection was prompted in part by a recent Instagram carousel published by Wundirra, particularly their framing of the Raygun conversation around access, cultural appropriation, institutional power and the responsibility to use access to open doors rather than occupy them. Their post prompted me to connect the current conversation with my own memories of Aboriginal breaking in Redfern and to think more deeply about what the Raygun story can teach us about equity in Australian institutions.
