No. 1 Women's Breaker Is Viral Olympian Raygun

The Australian breaker known as B-Girl Raygun took a lot of flak for her performance at the Paris Olympics. But 37-year-old Rachael Gunn just earned some new bragging rights: She's now the top-ranked women's breaker in the world, reports CNN. Gunn, who's an academic in her day job, sits atop the latest rankings by the World DanceSport Federation, which is the sport's governing body. A big factor in the No. 1 ranking is that Gunn won the 2023 WDSF Oceania Championships, the WDSF explains (see video of that here).

Gunn didn't win a single point at the Olympics, and some of her moves—including freezes and kangaroo hops—drew so much ridicule that the breaker made a plea on social media for the hatred to stop. Some critics accused her of her making it to Paris due to favoritism, but a Vox piece explains that she earned her spot "fair and square." In regard to those ridiculed moves, Gunn herself said she knew she wouldn't be able to outdo breakers in their 20s in terms of athleticism, so she needed a different approach. "Score by score, Raygun's dancing isn't actually that bad," declares the Vox piece by Swati Sharma. "Really." (More 2024 Paris Olympics stories.)