Raygun Reveals How Her Mental Health Is Doing After Being ‘Reduced to a Meme’ at Paris Olympics (Exclusive)
Raygun Reveals How Her Mental Health Is Doing After Being ‘Reduced to a Meme’ at Paris Olympics (Exclusive)
Natasha DyeMon, August 31, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC
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Raygun in the Paris Olympics; Rachael Gunn in Netflix’s ‘Untold: Breaking Badly’ (2026)Credit: Ezra Shaw/Getty; Courtesy Netflix -
Viral Olympic breaker Raygun tells PEOPLE which parts of her Netflix Untold episode were “difficult to watch,” two years after going viral in Paris
Raygun, whose real name is Rachael Gunn, admits she understands why her fellow B-girls slammed her in the documentary
Next, Gunn is hoping to do “something creative” and keep inspiring people to embrace being themselves
Two years after Rachael Gunn competed in the inaugural breaking event at the 2024 Paris Olympics under the name B-girl Raygun, she has a message for the world: “Come at me.”
“I’m ready this time,” Gunn, 38, tells PEOPLE as she prepares to tell her story — one marred by ruthless critics, baseless accusations and vicious rumors — in Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly, out Tuesday, Sept. 1 on Netflix.
“Some parts were absolutely difficult to watch,” says Gunn, a doctor of Cultural Studies from Macquarie University, whose thesis explored “de-territorializing gender” in the breaking community in Sydney, Australia, where she fell in love with the sport after first falling in love with her husband, Samuel Free, who formerly competed under the name B-boy Sammy Sex.
Days after Gunn’s performance became a major headline of the Paris Games, unfounded allegations against Free, 39, accused him of being a member of the Australian Breaking Association, thereby suggesting he was the reason his wife represented Australia in the Olympics.
Raygun competes at the 2024 Paris OlympicsCredit: Ezra Shaw/Getty
Gunn describes it as a “really tough” situation, especially as they navigated the viral backlash from her performance.
Even Gunn’s haters will tell you the rumor is false. Breaking Badly includes interviews from two of Gunn’s peers, B-girl Flix and B-girl Tinylocks, Gunn’s fellow athletes in the Sydney breaking community. Flix will tell viewers she was “offended” and “embarrassed” by Raygun’s performance in Paris, and Tinylocks describes Gunn’s pre-Olympic performance as “sloppy,” adding, “but then again, she always was.”
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Still, Flix admits Gunn “was the best B-girl on that day,” and the doc makes clear that Gunn won the spot on Team Australia fair and square.
Gunn was told “towards the end of the process that, yes,” Flix and Tinylocks would be interviewed for the project. “And then I hadn’t seen anything until I sat down and watched it.”
Even after watching Flix tell Netflix viewers she was “offended” and “embarrassed” by Raygun’s performance in Paris, Gunn says she understands the criticism from her fellow breakers.
“To be honest, it was a really hard time for breakers around the world, and it was an especially hard time for Australian B girls because of the attention that the community got, the scrutiny, the harassment. So people respond to that in different ways, so I understand that it was a hard time for them,” Gunn says.
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Raygun competes at the 2024 Paris OlympicsCredit: Ezra Shaw/Getty
And the harsh reviews from her fellow breakers weren’t even what stung Gunn the most. The hardest parts to watch were “all of the fast edits of the world’s reactions, and how big it got, the parts that were really tough at the time.”
Still, Netflix’s Breaking Badly has given Gunn closure on the incident she describes as being “reduced to a viral meme” by the world. “But also, it was like, wow, I got through that. We got through that. My husband and I, that’s amazing. We were kind of reminded of how insane it was, how absurd it was. So it was really cool to see me get through it at the end,” she says.
Gunn shares in Breaking Badly that she was prescribed antidepressants before the Games. “It was a few months before, and yeah, I mean, look, it threw things off, definitely, but also it eventually did help and calmed that anxiety,” she says.
“But to be honest, it was all part of the chaotic sundae that I was eating between the elite sports gym at 6 a.m. with people that’ve been athletes since they were three, training again in the afternoon and night, do the recovery, worry about your diet, do the 6 a.m. drug test because they’re knocking on your door. It was just chaos, it was crazy, but to be honest, I think [the medication] probably gave me a good little baseline to deal with what the world threw at me next.”
Raygun on April 17, 2024 in AustraliaCredit: Cameron Spencer/Getty
Two years removed from the world’s crushing criticism, Gunn says her mental health is “good” these days. “But I don’t take that for granted. It’s something that I’m constantly checking in on, and if I need to pull back from things, if I need to just take it easy at home, then I do that.”
Although she has yet to enter another 1v1 since the Olympics, Gunn tells PEOPLE she’s “entered just some small local jams” with her crew. “I’ve entered with some up-and-coming B-girls, give them some experience, and it’s been really nice to just go back in and support the scene and be part of the community.”
Raygun competes in the 2024 Paris OlympicsCredit: Ezra Shaw/Getty
Now, she’s ready for her next chapter. “I might have some things in my back pocket,” she says. “But I hope that this opens doors, to be honest,” she adds of Breaking Badly.
“I’d really like to do something fun and something creative. I’m definitely up for the unexpected. And if I can just continue to advocate for being yourself, being for creativity, for dance, for the arts, then that’d be amazing.”
No matter what comes next for Gunn, she’s “prepared for the twists and turns now,” she says.
“I think certainly this whole experience has made me a lot stronger, a lot more resilient. But it’s been really nice that I’ve had a chance to share my experiences through some speaking gigs and things like that and try and inspire people to be themselves and to get through what life throws at you.”
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
