Latest news with #RachaelGunn
ABC News
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The Raygun phenomenon
Introduced by Australian Story presenter Leigh Sales. When Australian B-girl Raygun took to the stage in the breaking at the Paris Olympics in 2024 she inadvertently became a viral sensation and cultural flashpoint. Her unique moves spawned thousands of memes, sparked heated debate and unleashed wild conspiracy theories. It was a devastating response for one person to shoulder and garnered sympathy and support for Raygun aka Rachael Gunn. The intense global reaction also caught the attention of comedian Steph Broadbridge, who was inspired to write an unauthorised musical parody or 'empathetic piss-take'. It may have seemed a very Australian response to a confounding cultural moment, but like everything with this story, it was complicated. This episode of Australian Story aims to break it down and shed some light on the fallout from breaking's debut at the Olympics. (Rachael Gunn declined an invitation to be involved.) Watch 'Break It Down' at 8pm Monday June 23 on ABC TV or iview
News.com.au
29-05-2025
- Health
- News.com.au
Rachael ‘Raygun' Gunn on how she handled Olympic breakdancing anxiety
Break-dancer Rachael 'Raygun' Gunn has revealed she was already struggling with anxiety before the Olympics but her mental health became so bad following worldwide vitriol over her viral performance she felt 'paralysed' and 'panicky' if her husband left her side. Opening up about her mental health struggles to encourage conversations as part of News Corp's Can We Talk campaign, in partnership with Medibank, the 37-year-old said getting off social media, support from loved ones and regular appointments with her psychologist helped. Gunn revealed she had started taking anti-anxiety medication about six months before Paris due to the immense pressure she felt ahead of being the first ever Australian female breaker to qualify for the Olympics. 'The Olympics is such a huge event and there's so much pressure on you, regardless of your chances,' she said. 'My journey with anxiety started before the big day when everything changed, but because I'd already had that experience with it and a bit of a support structure in place it meant I was able to get through that whirlwind of an adventure and the wild ride a bit easier.' Australia is in the grips of a mental health crisis, and people are struggling to know who to turn to, especially our younger generations. Can We Talk? is a News Corp awareness campaign, in partnership with Medibank, equipping Aussies with the skills needs to have the most important conversation of their life. But the months after were tough and she described feeling 'paralysed' and 'frozen' at times. 'I was just kind of stuck and paralysed until either Sammy (husband Samuel Free) came back or we found some friends or something,' she said. 'For a long time I generally felt out of my body, if that makes sense, like the whole world was different. 'I would have a good cry probably every couple of weeks because I felt so numb the rest of the time, like I couldn't be angry, I couldn't be upset, I was just trying to process everything that was happening. 'Then I would have a good cry and I would feel a bit better for a while. 'It's still hard, to be honest, I still have bad days.' But she has slowly been building back her confidence to do break dancing again. 'I used to practise on the street four nights a week, I still haven't got the confidence to do that but I am able to break at home with Sammy and a friend and build from there,' she said. 'Now I'm actually starting to enjoy it again and it's nice to be able to dance with no pressure and work on some moves.' Gunn said she was still at Macquarie University marking essays and helping out with teaching. 'I'm working on some stuff behind the scenes … you certainly haven't seen the last of me,' she said. The Olympian also shared how she'd taken up the hobby of knitting. 'This is my mental health scarf,' she said, holding it up. 'It's the most ridiculous thing, it's so long, but it was because I was so restless watching TV or whatever, it helped me do something with my hands and keep them busy because I feel like I get a lot of anxiety. 'It's just for me, so who cares, it will be ready in winter 2027 … it's nice to do something that has no pressure and you can just keep working on it and feel a sense of accomplishment. 'This is the stuff you have to explore when you're struggling with your mental health.' When she first returned to Australia and still wasn't in a good enough place to leave home, Gunn also got into 1980s Aerobics Oz Style videos on YouTube for exercise. 'When I came back to Sydney, I could barely leave the house, so I wasn't about to go to a gym or join a class so I looked on YouTube a lot for some workout videos,' she said. 'I did pilates and I've been doing yoga for years and I actually got into the old 80s Oz-Style Aerobics which were on YouTube. 'They're fun, they're good, they're easy.'
ABC News
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
How a legal stoush with Rachael Gunn elevated a comedy musical to a whole new level
Breaking: The Musical is certainly not about Olympic breaker Rachael 'Raygun' Gunn, assures the show's creator. It's about dreams, self-confidence, public condemnation, taking the piss, Olympic breakdancing and fighting an image problem with legal threats … but again, it is emphatically not about Raygun. It's actually about a 36-year-old Olympic breaker called 'Spraygun', the stage name of university lecturer, Sprachel Gunn. As the opening graphic disclaims, any resemblance to any other public figure is merely a coincidence. Comedian Steph Broadbridge, who also stars as Spraygun, had initially written a similar show, Raygun: The Musical, which was slated to debut in a small Sydney venue in December last year. The controversy catapulted the show into the spotlight, with the comedian working the legal stoush into her craft, opening to sold-out shows across the Sydney Comedy Festival, Melbourne Comedy Festival and Adelaide Fringe. After wrapping in Sydney on the weekend, it will begin a regional tour and Broadbridge has flagged a possible run at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show opens on Hornsby Shire in Sydney's suburban north, where Rachael Gunn grew up. It also happens to be where upper-middle class Sprachel longs for a life beyond her white picket fence. She meets a breakdancer at the local Police Citizens Youth Club and he convinces her that breaking is not just for the urban minorities who developed the style, but it is indeed her calling. As her love for the genre grows, so does their romance. "I might be a B-girl, but I'll always be an A-girl to him," Sprachel sings. An unfortunate pulled muscle rules her boyfriend out of the running for the Olympics, and he pours his efforts into her success. A vampiric lawyer lurks off stage, emerging from the shadows whenever a character attempts the infamous kangaroo move, asserted to be the intellectual property of Gunn. The script and songs are dense with clever comedy, not just about she-who-will-not-be-named, but about Australian society in general. The levity is pierced with a ballad when Spraygun faces international backlash after her Olympic flop, showing Broadbridge isn't purely making jabs at her alleged subject, but also the public's level of animosity. The cast is unserious and unpolished, and the Microsoft Paint-style graphics remind you that the production isn't trying to be anything it's not. But that's not to be confused with amateurism — the show itself rises beyond cheap gags on a well-known public saga and has a surprising level of depth and wit. At the end of the show, the audience is goaded into getting up to join in the Spraygun dance. Looking around the venue, it's clear that while we all laughed at Gunn's Olympic attempt, none of us are exactly gold medal contenders. Gunn became the stand-out figure of Paris 2024 when public indignation ironically fuelled her stardom. Now she's gifted that same ironic logic to Broadbridge's show, with her own criticism of the musical elevating the project to a whole new level, proving once again that giving air to a PR crisis can turn an ember into a bonfire.
