KATE EMERY: Why Australian breaking ‘loser’ Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn is our real Olympic champion

Olympic breakdancer Raygun should — and I think ultimately will — be feted for what she is: an Australian folk hero.

Not since Paul Mercurio’s Scott Hastings lost the Southern Districts Waratah Championship with his flashy, “crowd pleasing” steps has Australia enjoyed a dance scandal of this magnitude.

But just as Hastings earned the love of the crowd — if not the acceptance of the Australian Dancing Federation — by the end of Strictly Ballroom’s 94-minute running time, so too will Raygun be embraced by the masses.

The reason is simple: Raygun, in all her green and gold track-suited glory, embodies much of what Australians secretly like about themselves.

The 36-year-old turned up to the Olympic stage ready to have an absolute crack and that takes balls.

More than that, whether she was writhing like a toddler having a tantrum in the supermarket lolly aisle or introducing the world to The Sprinkler, Raygun gave every impression of not taking herself too seriously.

Travelling through life lightly — as lightly as Raygun’s bouncing kangaroo move — is supposed to be an Australian trait.

We take the piss out of ourselves and each other.

At least half of that dynamic was on full display after Raygun, having failed to coax a point out of any of the Olympian judges, coaxed a hundred memes out of the internet instead.

Australians piled on like Raygun had been caught eating a Bunnings sausage the wrong way — not performing an undeniably creative, if also quite cringe, full-body dry heave on the world stage.

It wasn’t just the Aussies: Raygun’s unconventional moves made headlines in the New York Times and entranced UK singing superstar Adele to such an extent that she brought it up at her weekend concert at Munich.

“It’s all me and my friends have been talking about. And I am not saying anything, but I think it’s the best thing that has happened at the Olympics for the entire time,” Adele said.

“I can’t work out if it was a joke but either way it has made me very, very happy and me and my friends have been sh*tting ourselves laughing for nearly 24 hours.”

Adele was referencing a theory that Rachael Gunn, Raygun’s academic alter-ego, who wrote her PhD on the intersection of gender and Sydney’s breakdancing culture, was engaging not in sporting competition at the highest level but a piece of performance art.

Maybe this is the case and Raygun will emerge with a great academic paper, bumper street cred and, ideally, a Dancing With the Stars appearance.

But I doubt it. More than that, I don’t want to believe it’s a bit, not when the alternative is that someone like Raygun exists: a millennial woman with the balls to give it a go in a country where “try hard” is an insult.

Raygun described her style like this: “All my moves are original”.

(We never doubted it, Raygun, we believed.)

“Creativity is really important to me,” she said. “I go out there and I show my artistry.

“Sometimes it speaks to the judges and sometimes it doesn’t. I do my thing and it represents art. That is what it is about.”

If Raygun can be believed — and my faith in her is such that I’d give her my PIN if she asked me through the medium of interpretive dance — she was never there to take on the more athletic and physically demanding breaking moves that ultimately saw Japan’s entrant take home gold.

“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative because how many chances do you get in a lifetime to do that on an international stage?” she said.

Raygun might have made us laugh but she did more than that: she was joyful.

She brought us joy, not just from the jokes at her expense, but in what the Olympics does best: collective experience.

If you didn’t spend your weekend sharing clips of Raygun with friends, family and every WhatsApp group available to you, you missed out on one of those rare moments where everyone was talking about the same thing.

Better yet, for once the collective experience wasn’t rooted in a massive bummer, like Donald Trump being shot or a peak-COVID press conference. For a moment there we were all watching, marvelling and talking about a funny little dance and it was glorious.

Even Raygun’s choice of attire, the green and gold tracksuit, channelled another iconic Australian image: former prime minister John Howard in his Wallabies tracksuit, power-walking around Lake Burley Griffin.

It doesn’t get more Australian than that.

There aren’t many Australian Olympic moments that feel instantly iconic.

Cathy Freeman winning gold at Sydney? Obviously. Kieran Perkins’ 1500m freestyle win at Atlanta? Absolutely. Steven Bradbury winning Australia’s first winter Olympic gold after his speed-skating rivals crashed? I think of it daily.

Will “doing a Raygun” join the Australian lexicon the way that “doing a Bradbury” has?

Raygun already has the feel of 2024’s answer to Eric the Eel or Eddie the Eagle: chancers who earned our respect not for their collection of medals but their willingness to go toe-to-toe with the best in the world, in spite of all available evidence that they were not destined for victory.

So, one can only hope.

Certainly the image of Raygun — here squirming like she’s trying to put on her skinny jeans after a big meal, there cavorting like she’s trying to scare off a bee — will linger with me, long after I’ve forgotten the names of other Olympic champions who actually took home the hardware.