That Olympic break dancer everyone laughed at? She just became the World No. 1.
Summary
Raygun, whose performance became one of the memes of the Paris Games, found herself top of the breaking world rankings this week due to a series of obscure bylaws from the sport’s world governing body.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 Olympics, the WDSF intentionally stopped holding ranking events so that the breakers could “focus solely on the last part of their Olympic qualification without the added pressure." Neither qualifying nor the Olympics had points on offer either because of the limited athlete quotas.
The outcome couldn’t have been more bizarre. Once the Olympics ended, many of the results included in the rankings simply expired, the WDSF said. That left plenty of breakers with just one event’s worth of ranking points.
That’s how Raygun’s lone first-place finish propelled her into a points tie with another “B-Girl" named Riko from Japan. Raygun won the No. 1 slot over Riko in the end based on Article 5.1.1 of the bylaws, which settles ties based on the level of the competition where the points were earned.
Even in a sport as offbeat as breaking, no one had foreseen this level of weirdness. The scenario is so unusual that even the WDSF appears to be taking its own rankings as seriously as a kangaroo trying to play cricket.
“Until WDSF ranking events recommence later this year," the organization said, “the world rankings as they currently stand should be interpreted in conjunction with results from recent global Breaking competitions for a more accurate reflection of the global competitive landscape."
In other words, maybe ignore them for now.
And the WDSF does have a point. Just as strange as Raygun’s presence atop the rankings is the absence from the Top 50 of Japan’s B-Girl Ami, who won the gold medal in Paris. The silver and bronze medalists are also missing.
But if Raygun’s ranking feels like the punchline to one long Olympic joke, she has done her best to tune out the noise. After the Games, she called the backlash “devastating."
Now, she may be having the last laugh—Raygun is on top of the world.
