Opinion Express View: Everyone laughed at B-Girl Raygun. Now she’s on top

Widely mocked, meme-ified and made viral in the worst possible way, B-Girl Raygun (Rachael Gunn), the breaker who was cruelly pilloried following her Olympics performance last month, seems to be having the last laugh. Improbably, given that she scored exactly zero points in her three rounds at Paris 2024, the 37-year-old Australian dancer and academic is the world’s top woman breaker, according to the World DanceSport Federation.

It turns out that, over the past year, there was a much smaller pool of breakers to make up the rankings as most of the world’s top breakers were busy preparing for the Olympics and did not have the time to compete in other events. Raygun, one of Australia’s top breakers, topped the Oceania Continental Championships in Sydney last October, which propelled her to the number one position — a reign that ends next month. Her triumph might be brief, therefore, but it should offer Raygun some much-needed validation.

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She might also take heart from the fact that success or failure often comes down not to talent, but the merest technicality. One reason why Raygun’s Olympics performance registered a nil on the scoreboard, as one of the judges of the competition explained, is that the format was simply not flexible enough to accommodate the breaker’s experimental style. That Raygun now rules the breaking roost also comes down to another technicality, of her being one of the few dancers to participate in, and win, a non-Olympics-related event. The bigger lesson is about the ephemerality of success and failure, fame and infamy, particularly in the digital age, when one viral moment is quickly replaced by the next. After weeks of trolling, Raygun has finally had her day.