The Raygun documentary ducks a big question about the Olympic fame of a ‘dorky white academic’

“Right before the Olympics, I went to my therapist, panicked,” she says. Her therapist asked her what was the worst thing that could happen. And she said, “The whole world could laugh at me.” Her therapist responded: “Do you think that’s reasonable?” Cue Gunn’s hysterical laughter.

Anyone who has ever gone to a therapist will be amused at this anecdote. Nine and a half times out 10, the therapist would have been right. No, they’d say, the worst outcome you can imagine probably won’t come to pass. But in Gunn’s case, what she feared the most did, in fact, happen. Her shenanigans – the sprinkler, the kangaroo hops – in the cypher made her go viral almost as soon as she was done with her sets. (Perhaps if Gunn had been explicit about what she was planning to do in her sets, her therapist would have reacted differently.) Gunn’s performance launched a thousand memes, more than a couple of late-night TV segments, several conspiracy theories, and even a musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

“She became the most famous breaker on planet Earth overnight,” Flix, a fellow Australian B-girl, says in the documentary. All without winning a single vote from any of the nine judges across her six rounds.

Untold Raygun, which premieres globally on Netflix on Tuesday, really doesn’t dwell on what it means for breaking, an art form created by Black and Brown youth in the South Bronx, that its first Olympic foray will be primarily – if not exclusively – remembered for a white woman from Australia doing the sprinkler instead of the dynamic performances of the rest of the contenders. It’s mostly focused on Gunn herself with little time spent on the greater context of the art form and how it ended up in the Olympics. The documentary features interviews with Gunn, her parents, her husband who introduced her to breaking, and a few dancers who know her from the Aussie scene. Through them, we get a coming of almost middle-age story about an academic who meets a B-boy working at a call center, falls in love with him and the art form he’s passionate about, and somehow ends up centerstage at the Olympics.

Gunn is likeable in the documentary. She comes across as (mostly) self-aware and self-deprecating. Her parents are charming, laughing heartily when asked if they had ever previously associated “Olympian” with their quirky daughter. Sammy Free seems like a sweet fellow who is completely besotted with his wife. (We should all be so lucky to find someone who loves us the way that Free clearly loves Gunn.) But the most useful voices in Untold Raygun are the two Australian B-girls who offer some critical perspective on the place of women in the breaking scene and Gunn’s performances at the Games. They’re harsh, at times, but also fair.

Tinylocks, one of Gunn’s contemporaries, repeatedly invokes “No easy props,” a term that’s something of a hip-hop ethos about having to prove your skill to earn respect. (The phrase is often associated with American B-girl Asia One, who founded a crew called No Easy Props in 1997.) “It was such a male dominated space and B-girls were really fighting to be seen but as more women started entering breaking, it was felt that some girls were getting accolades too early in their careers. The crowd would cheer just for participating,” she says.

It is within the context of “no easy props” that Tinylocks offers her assessment of Raygun’s pre-Olympic performances, as she was coming up in the small Australian scene. “There were one or two times when I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that was fresh.’ Maybe not so much the other times.”

Tinylocks decided to pass on trying to earn the Oceania qualifying spot. “I’m interested in breaking as an art form,” she says, which is a sentiment I heard from other dancers in the scene after the Olympic trajectory was announced by the IOC and the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF). Flix gave it a go at the Oceania qualifier, but said that, at 41, she didn’t expect much. Gunn was surprised that she kept advancing through the bracket until she was in the final battle against B-girl Molly. If you go back and watch the Oceania qualifier, you won’t see any of Gunn’s “iconic” moves from the Paris Olympics in that final. What she threw down against Molly doesn’t stand out in any way – either for good or for bad. Yes, her movements were slow and lacked sharpness, her sets not particularly intricate. But she showed fairly standard breaking foundation movements. If she had done those sets in Paris, Gunn wouldn’t have advanced out of the preliminary rounds but she also wouldn’t have become a global sensation.

The documentary explains the change in her set composition: she realized how far behind she was the top B-girls she was going to be battling at the Olympics. She went to a couple of European battles in the months before the Games and performed poorly in all of them. Gunn and her husband decided to change their approach. Instead of trying to up the difficulty content of her sets through power moves – the acrobatics like headspins and windmills that laypeople associate with breaking – they would go all in on originality, one of the five categories breaking judges evaluate at the Games. (The other four were technique, vocabulary, execution and musicality.) They had gone from hoping to win one battle or even one round to trying to win a single vote from one of the nine judges. Gunn and Free said they looked to Australia for movement inspiration from its famous wildlife (kangaroo) to its dance moves (the sprinkler). They even added a nod to swimming, an Olympic sport at which Australia excels. Despite this strategy, Gunn didn’t get a single vote in Paris.

There’s a world in which this approach could have worked for Gunn but it’s a world where she is much better at breaking fundamentals, where her footwork is s