Rachael Gunn

About Rachael

Rachael Gunn — better known to the world as Raygun — became one of the most talked-about athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics, competing in breaking's debut on the Olympic stage after winning the 2023 Oceania Breaking Championships and topping the Australian B-girl rankings that year. She had previously represented Australia at the World Breaking Championships in Paris, Seoul and Leuven. The global conversation that followed her Paris performance was intense, polarising and, for Rachael, deeply instructive — a real-time lesson in how to navigate perceived failure, public scrutiny and the noise of opinion at the highest possible volume.

Behind the persona is a scholar as well as an athlete. Rachael completed a PhD in cultural studies at Macquarie University in 2017, with a thesis on the intersection of gender and Sydney's breaking culture, and lectured there from 2020 until 2026 — a combination that gives her an unusually thoughtful lens on the relationship between identity, performance, cultural expression and what it means to bring a genuinely different self to a mainstream stage.

She retired from competitive breaking in November 2024. Since Paris she has become a compelling voice on resilience, authentic self-expression and the courage it takes to be seen — particularly when the world's reaction is not the one she hoped for. She speaks from lived experience about the journey back from perceived failure, what builds genuine resilience, and why embracing what makes a person different is not just personally important but culturally necessary.