Netflix’s Untold is ostensibly a series of sports documentaries. However, since its inception five years ago, it has been most successful when sport collides with the wider celebrity machine. There have been films about Caitlyn Jenner, Jake Paul and Vinnie Jones. The gold tends to come when the subjects spill over into public notoriety. With that in mind, it was only a matter of time before they made a film about Raygun.
You may remember Raygun as the Australian breakdancer who spent the biggest moment of her career at the Paris Olympics thrashing around like a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket. If you didn’t see her routine, you will almost certainly be aware of the memes she inspired. Adele discussed her during a concert. Rachel Dratch did an impersonation of her on Jimmy Fallon. For months, Raygun was everywhere. As this film demonstrates, she really didn’t want to be.
This, of course, is part of the great Olympic tradition. In every competition, a country will put up an athlete who – while perhaps the best in their country – finds themselves wildly out of their league on the international stage. Raygun entered the same Olympic pantheon as Eddie the Eagle, Eric Moussambani and the Jamaican bobsleigh team; competitors whose limitations made them more famous than most champions.
However, there are a couple of key differences here. The first is that Raygun was competing in a sport that had never previously been held at the Olympics, and whose inclusion was already primed for ridicule. The second is that she was competing in the age of social media, allowing every idiot with a phone to mock her performance in real time. Crashing out of the Olympics with zero points was one thing. Knowing that the world considered you a joke turned out to be far worse.
Raygun – real name Dr Rachael Gunn, author of the PhD thesis Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl’s Experience of B-boying – is understandably front and centre here, which is good because she turns out to be an intensely charismatic person, in turn open and joyful and infectious. The same can be said for her husband, Sam, a breaker whose professional name (at least before he started training children) was Sammy Sex.
It is through their eyes that this textbook Olympic underdog story is told. A country holds trials for the Olympics. The best person on the day gets through, only to realise fairly quickly that the rest of the world is leagues ahead of them. Gunn watches in dismay as she realises that her unique brand of creative breaking doesn’t mesh with the hardcore power moves of the world elite. In effect, Australia entered an interpretive dancer into a gymnastics competition. Of course she was going to do badly. By her own admission, judged by these criteria, she was “pretty shit”.
It’s an opinion that, for a time, the world happened to share. A couple of Australian breakers named Tinylocks and Flix form a Greek chorus here, taking uncomfortably gleeful pleasure in Raygun’s public downfall. But their opinions are amplified by reams of social media posts that gradually balloon out of all proportion, with some falsely claiming that Gunn qualified only because her husband was head of the Olympic committee, and others projecting no end of vitriol about her perceived privilege.
It was a truly ugly spectacle. Gunn began to take antidepressants and made a video begging the media to leave her alone. Needless to say, the video made the news, in one case above rolling text reporting the latest tally of dead Palestinians.
But once the outrage burned off, people started to notice what Gunn had done. Rather than try to keep up with her more conventionally talented competitors, she entered the Olympics on her own terms. Obviously that didn’t work, because she left the group stage without a single point, but what we saw was a woman being her complete, undiluted self.
And isn’t that more relatable than almost anything else at the Olympics? Most Olympians have pushed everything else aside for years, pinning the outcome of their lives on a single moment. Raygun, meanwhile, was a bundle of nerves – underprepared and brimming with impostor syndrome – who was simply trying to get through the day unscathed. In that respect, she may have been the most human athlete there.
