SYDNEY / LOS ANGELES
Few sixty-second performances in Olympic history have traveled as far, or as strangely, as Rachael Gunn's breaking routine at the 2024 Paris Games. The Australian academic-turned-B-girl, competing under the name Raygun, scored zero points across three battles, and within hours her kangaroo hops and sprinkler-style arm movements had been clipped, memed, and mocked by hundreds of millions of people who had never watched a breaking competition in their lives. Two years on, Netflix is revisiting that moment from the inside, with a documentary that arrives this week promising, in the streamer's own words, a deep dive into "the memes, misinformation, and conspiracy theories" that engulfed Gunn's Olympic debut.
"Untold: Raygun — Breaking Badly" is the latest installment of Netflix's long-running Untold sports documentary strand, and it lands at a moment when Gunn says she has finally made a kind of peace with what happened in Paris — even if the internet, by her own account, has not entirely let it go.
A Viral Moment, Revisited
The film retraces Gunn's path from competitive academic — she holds a PhD examining gender and breaking culture — to Olympic athlete, a route that made her an unusually easy target once the backlash began. According to the trailer, Gunn recounts a therapy session in which her therapist asked her to imagine the worst-case outcome of her Olympic run. "The whole world could laugh at me?" she recalls answering, a line that now doubles as the film's emotional thesis.
"I know I'm a dorky white woman who's an academic," Gunn says elsewhere in the trailer. "And I'm a B-girl." That tension — between the persona the internet decided she was and the years of genuine competitive breaking behind her Olympic run — is the throughline the documentary appears most interested in unpacking, alongside the wilder fringes of the backlash: conspiracy theories claiming her routine was a deliberate stunt, harassment campaigns, and false rumors that spread faster than any correction could catch up to them.
From Backlash to Retirement to Reflection
Gunn announced her retirement from competitive breaking in the months following Paris, citing the scale of the backlash as "devastating" in interviews at the time, and issuing a statement expressing regret for the distraction the controversy caused to the sport of breaking itself, which had only just made its Olympic debut. The documentary picks up that thread, following Gunn through the process of processing — her word — a level of global attention that few athletes outside the most decorated Olympic stars ever experience, for a result that, competitively, barely registered.
In recent interviews promoting the film, Gunn has struck a more settled tone than in the immediate aftermath of the Games. "Paris is now just a part of my story," she said. "For me, it's more about radical acceptance of everything that's happened and just one foot in front of the other, just trying to move ahead." She has also been candid about the surreal specifics of the pile-on: "The conspiracy theories were totally wild," she said of the more extreme claims that circulated online. "But I just try and stay on the positives and that's what gets me through."
Why Netflix, Why Now
The Untold franchise has built its reputation on revisiting sports stories that became bigger than the sport itself — doping scandals, on-court meltdowns, viral controversies — and giving the people at the center of them a chance to narrate events on their own terms, often years after the news cycle has moved on. Raygun's story fits that mold almost too neatly: a moment engineered entirely by internet virality, disconnected from the actual mechanics of Olympic breaking scoring, that nonetheless produced real consequences for one person's life and career.
The timing also lines up with breaking's uncertain Olympic future. The sport, which made its debut in Paris, was not included on the program for the Los Angeles 2028 Games, and Gunn's saga — for better or worse — became one of the most widely recognized global touchpoints breaking has had. A documentary reexamining that moment arrives as both a personal reckoning for Gunn and, implicitly, a referendum on how the sport's brief Olympic moment will be remembered.
In Her Own Words
I know I'm a dorky white woman who's an academic. And I'm a B-girl.
— Rachael Gunn, in the trailer for "Untold: Raygun — Breaking Badly"
What This Means for You
Beyond the specifics of one athlete's story, Raygun's documentary is a useful case study in how quickly online mockery can outrun the facts of an event, and how disproportionate the consequences can be for the person on the receiving end. For anyone who shared a meme of Gunn's routine in August 2024 without a second thought, the film is a reminder that virality has a real person attached to it on the other side of the screen.
It's also a chance to revisit breaking itself — a sport with a rich, decades-long global culture that briefly became a punchline through no fault of its own competitive integrity. Viewers curious about the actual sport, rather than the meme, may come away from the documentary with a very different picture of what happened in Paris than the one that dominated headlines at the time.
"Untold: Raygun — Breaking Badly" premieres on Netflix on September 1, closing the loop on one of the strangest viral stories of the last several Olympic cycles — and giving its most famous participant the closing word she never got in the moment itself.
