A new documentary about an Olympic debacle
Dear Watchers,Shortly before the 2024 Summer Olympics, Rachael Gunn told her therapist she was panicking about how she would perform at the event. “What’s the worst that could happen?” her therapist asked. “The whole world could laugh at me,” Gunn responded. “She’s like, ‘Do you think that’s reasonable?’” Gunn recalls with a laugh in a new episode of the Netflix sports documentary series “Untold.” Turns out the anxiety was not only reasonable, it was prophetic. Rachael Gunn is more commonly known as Raygun, the B-girl who represented Australia in the Olympics’ first-ever breaking competition and became a laughingstock because of her quirky, unintentionally funny moves. Her episode, cleverly titled “Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly,” premieres Tuesday on Netflix and traces the events leading up to and following her notorious performance on the world’s biggest athletic stage. It’s one of three new installments in the nonfiction franchise: “The Testimony of Vince Young,” the story of the former quarterback, is streaming now, and “Mr. T: I Pity the Fool,” arrives on Sept. 8. The Raygun episode is likely to be the buzziest of the three — who wouldn’t be curious about how it feels to briefly become the planet’s biggest joke? Chapman and Maclain Way (“Wild Wild Country”), the documentarians and brothers who created “Untold,” don’t shy away from depicting the harshness of the response to Raygun’s performance, even from people who know her. A fellow Australian breaker known as Flix, who was friends with Gunn for 15 years, says she was “embarrassed” and “offended” by her display in Paris because she thought it was disrespectful, to her opponents and the country she represented. “I didn’t expect to feel angry, but I was furious,” says Flix, whose given name is Leah Clark. But “Breaking Badly” is equally honest about the overwhelming pressure Gunn, an academic by day and a breaker on the side, faced while trying to train for a new Olympic sport in just nine months with her husband, also a breaker, as her primary coach. At one point, Gunn is asked why she didn’t quit when she realized there was no way she could be ready in time to compete credibly. “I don’t like to have regrets, and I think I knew that, deep down, if I walked away, I would’ve regretted it more, and that would’ve haunted me,” she says. “Breaking Badly” ultimately casts Raygun as a resilient figure who figures out how to find the positives in what happened and continue to move forward. The film reveals that Gunn has left academia and is trying to begin a new chapter in life (it still involves breaking) — so maybe this entertaining documentary is the first step in a multipronged rebranding effort. But people have done far more horrible things on a public stage without feeling shame or suffering any repercussions, so maybe we should give Raygun a break. Also this week
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