Just hours before representing Australia at the Paris 2024 opening ceremony, Rachael Gunn had a panic attack in the middle of the Olympic village.
Thrust into an environment full of experienced athletes, it dawned on Gunn, whose professional background is as a university lecturer, what she had got herself into.
Known as Raygun when competing, she was about to take part in the breakdancing event – or breaking – which was making its Olympic debut.
“I felt like an imposter,” said the 38-year-old breaker, during a new Netflix documentary about her experience at the Games.
She describes how she reacted when she saw someone she recognised from the Olympic team.
“I just could not stop crying… I had a panic attack. ‘What am I doing? What have I done? Should I be doing this?'” she said.
Just a few hours later, she was sailing down the River Seine alongside the rest of the Australian cohort, waving to onlookers.
Less than a fortnight after that, her Olympic journey was over. Gunn failed to win any of her three round-robin battles at the Games, but walked away pleased with how she had acquitted herself.
“Finishing my last round, the world champion Nicka [Dominika Banevic] gave me props for my moves, the MC celebrated my stuff and the vibe was just generally good,” Gunn told BBC Sport.
What she hadn’t anticipated was that one of her performances, in which she debuted some unconventional moves including a sprinkler and a kangaroo hop, had gone viral.
There were memes. There was a sketch on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Adele referenced the performance in one of her concerts. Chris Hemsworth defended Gunn in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel. At one point in August 2024, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese even felt moved to speak out, praising Gunn for having “a crack”.
“It was pretty wild the way I became a topic of conversation in spaces I never thought I would be,” said Gunn.
Alongside the teasing, there were more sinister forces brewing, including conspiracy theories about nepotism – for instance that Gunn’s husband and trainer, Samuel Free, had been on the selection committee when she qualified to represent her country at the Games, when he hadn’t been.
“It was really tough when mine and Sammy’s credibility, ethics and motivations were being called into question,” Gunn said.
“You could just spend 30 seconds researching and find plenty of sources to debunk these conspiracies, but that’s not how people use the internet anymore.”
That new-found scrutiny took a toll on Gunn’s mental health.
“I felt like my whole life was just kind of crumbling before me.. .and I was just trying to get through the day,” she says in the documentary.
In the process of making a film about that time, however, she feels that she’s been able to regain some agency.
“It’s taken a long time for me to process what happened,” Gunn told BBC Sport.
“It’s really exciting for me to finally have a voice again.”
