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Australian athletes achieved a record gold medal haul at the Paris Olympics but their success has been overshadowed by the exploits of an unsuccessful breakdancer.
Rachael “Raygun” Gunn, a university professor from Sydney, represented Australia in the breaking competition in Paris with a routine that included mimicking a hopping kangaroo and imitating a sprinkler but failed to earn any votes from the judges.
So great was the mockery on social media and the backlash in Australia that some questioned her selection for the sport, which featured for the first time at Paris.
Megan Davis, a high-profile Australian academic and sports administrator, suggested on social media that the street-dancing professor’s poor performance was part of Gunn’s academic study. A petition questioning her selection, which also criticised Australia’s Paris Olympics chief Anna Meares, gathered more than 50,000 signatures.
The Australian Olympic Committee described the claims as “vexatious, misleading and bullying”. It said Gunn was selected after winning an Oceania event in 2023 that was conducted under the Olympic qualification system with nine independent international judges presiding over the contest. Breakers from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea competed.
“The petition has stirred up public hatred without any factual basis. It’s appalling. No athlete who has represented their country at the Olympic Games should be treated in this way,” said Matt Carroll, chief executive of the AOC, which flagged the petition for misinformation about the selection process. It was removed on Friday.
Gunn denied that her routine was a mockery of the sport. “I did take it very seriously,” she said in an Instagram video on Thursday, adding that the torrent of online abuse had been “pretty devastating”.
The “Raygun” scandal comes as Australia has invested heavily in emerging sports.
Australia won 18 gold medals in Paris, a record number which placed it fourth in the table behind the US, China and Japan. The country’s haul of 53 medals was its second-best tally, after its performance at its home Games in 2000.
Australian athletes won medals in Paris for swimming and sailing, sports in which the country has traditionally performed well. But it also won gold medals for recently introduced sports, including BMX bike riding and skateboarding.
“In terms of the economics of sport, this has paid off,” said Tim Harcourt, chief economist at the Centre for Sport, Business and Society at the University of Technology Sydney, pointing to the investment in sporting facilities in the country and the success of its athletes in Paris.
Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, praised Gunn this week for “having a go”, which he said was in the spirit both of Australian culture and Olympic sport.
Meares, a former gold medal-winning cyclist, described online attacks on Gunn as misogynistic and an echo of the discrimination female athletes used to face. Meares told reporters that it had taken “great courage” from Gunn to participate in a sport that had recently been dominated by men.
Christopher Luxon, New Zealand’s prime minister, described Gunn as “awesome” during a speech at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday.
“When you think about New Zealand and Australia’s contributions, you had the iconic [wildlife conservationist] Steve Irwin, we had the great Kiwi suffragist Kate Sheppard and now you have gifted the world Raygun,” he said during a conversation centred on international relations.
As an overnight sensation, Gunn, a professor in cultural studies at Macquarie University whose PhD was entitled “Deterritorialising Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing Scene”, would probably have a lucrative career as a result, Harcourt said.
“Her lectures will be packed. She’s now the best-known professor of cultural studies in the world,” he said.
He compared her to Steven Bradbury who won Australia’s first gold medal at the Winter Olympics in 2002 when all his competitors in the speed skating final crashed in front of him.
“I grew up with Reaganomics but this is new. This is Raygunomics,” Harcourt said.
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