Incredulity, mockery, viciousness, humour, hero-status and now critical appraisal. The short but full life of one of the Olympics’ most viral stories.   

In 2013, Tom Phillips, then editorial director at Buzzfeed UK, documented one of the most infamous patterns of online culture.

It was peak Buzzfeed — a numbered list compiled using screenshots of other people’s tweets. Headlined The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm, the subheading promised “a tour of the anger factory” and it was a breakdown of all that happens online when someone has “done something bad” and it hits Twitter. 

The work itself is not sparkling prose, but Phillips provided an instantly recognisable “anatomy” of how people are villainised (and deified) online at breakneck speed in real time. He has since abandoned the network formerly known as Twitter, but the cycle of internet fame and infamy he rudimentarily called attention to lives on, superpowered by the rise of online video platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

Rachael “Raygun” Gunn began her first breaking battle at the Paris Olympics on Friday, August 9 at 4:13pm (2:13am NZT). Breaking (breakdancing to the layperson) debuted at the Olympics this year. Gunn is a 36-year-old academic who teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney, researches the “cultural politics of breaking” and was Australia’s “B-girl” or women’s breaking representative at the Olympics.

She competed against three other breakers in Paris and scored zero points. As an exemplar of world-class breaking, she objectively failed, but she has succeeded at breaking the internet nonetheless.

Many in her home country were asleep when Raygun introduced us to the kangaroo hop, the dog-on-grass-after-a-bath flail, and her John Howard-as-a-PE-teacher style. Olympic-heads and patriots in the Southern hemisphere woke up to the component parts of a viral moment in full whir. 

It didn’t matter if you’d missed the actual live broadcast of the event because you were now being served multiple clips of Raygun’s performance on TikTok, Instagram Reels and Twitter. TikTok and Instagram have made it possible for anyone to edit and soundtrack video, a behaviour that already feels as old as the hills, but was barely in its infancy at the 2016 Olympic games in Brazil. TikTok’s user base has nearly doubled in the three years since the “Covid bubble” Olympics in Tokyo in 2021.

Raygun’s routine was set to the Seinfeld theme and the Men at Work song ‘Down Under’. It was spliced with clips of Kath & Kim, and Chris Lilley’s character Mr G from Summer Heights High. As quickly as they were being loaded, they were being disabled “in response to a report by the copyright owner”. Despite the obvious and necessary role of social media in propelling the Olympics beyond pay TV walls and into stratospheric attention economy heights, broadcasters have rights to Olympics footage and meme-makers do not.

The initial response, concocted in the wee hours while Australia slept, was one of incredulity and mockery.

An early tweet, sent by some guy with a few hundred followers on X, has now been picked up by multiple media outlets as an encapsulation of the initial response.“The more I watch the videos of Raygun, the Aussie breaker, the more I get annoyed. There’s 27.7 million Australians in the world and that’s who they send to the Olympics for this inaugural event??? C’mon now!”, it read. 

Questions began to swirl about how Gunn had qualified. Some of these questions had been alluded to, and partially answered by the Sydney Morning Herald the day before, but this lay somewhat dormant until the internet cycle was ready to swing into phase 17 of Raygun’s virality. There are several iterations and a climb up Google and X’s trending search and topic mountain to get through before arriving back at the factually reported background.

In addition to the trolling and mockery, there were also early signs of hands gathering to lift Raygun upon the wobbly pedestal of internet fame and heroism. One of the most assuredly human parts of the internet fame machine is that at some point, people collectively respond to the psychic weight being heaped upon a living, breathing person and work to swing the pendulum back the other way. There’s a claim made of the person being trolled and mocked and an embrace that is warm and full of our own hopes, dreams, identities, insecurities and anxieties.

The energy shifted and Raygun was not a national embarrassment, but a national hero. Not all internet fame stories have the potential to become parochial, but Raygun’s fame was only enhanced when matched with popular notions of nationhood and snippets of Australian pop culture. Raygun was bringing some classic Australian moves to the global stage, something Americans wouldn’t understand. By midday Saturday, someone had created an image of an Australian five-dollar note with Raygun on it. Raygun was, in the most Australian way possible, “just giving it a bloody go”.

Raygun was also “millennial excellence.” Generational stereotyping and “warfare” is a deep and popular wellspring of identity assertion online. The tweet below, which first connected Raygun to her generation, has had over one million views.

Like a rolling stone gathering discourse moss, the response then morphed further, taking on gender narratives. It entered its meta social narrative and teachable moment phase when Australia’s Olympic chef de mission, Anna Meares, got involved. Meares described the criticism of Gunn’s performance as misogynistic, saying: “Now you look at the history of what we have had as women athletes, have faced in terms of criticism, belittlement, judgment, and simple comments like ‘They shouldn’t be there’.”

Gunn herself posted one of the Kath & Kim videos to her Instagram story and added her own contribution to the gender discourse by saying, “Looking forward to the same level of scrutiny on what the boys wear tomorrow.” In fairness to her, the boy’s uniform is pretty much the same as hers, equally as daggy, and very little commentary has emerged about Australia’s B-boy, J-Attack. Countering her assertion is that J-Attack did slightly better than Gunn, picking up a couple of points. By the time he got to perform, Raygun’s performance had also sucked all the oxygen out of the breaking chat room. No one is talking about J-Attack or the breakers who actually won medals.  There is only so much attention to go around.

By Sunday, there were T-shirts featuring Raygun’s kangaroo/t-rex arms move being sold via Instagram stores. Politicians entered the chat with Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese praising her for “having a crack”. The media were also in full whir mode and perhaps a bit late to the “internet sweetheart, Australia’s next queen or governor general” storyline emerging about Raygun online. Gunn was “under fire”. Among the 50 stories about Raygun run by the Daily Mail in the last three days, was a story about her Instagram being flooded with abusive comments. It pointed people back to her account because nothing says viral sensation like the seemingly eternal social media to media to social media oscillation. Her videos have gone from picking up tens of thousands of views to cracking the one million view mark. 

Heavy, though, is the head that wears the crown of overexposure and internet fame fatigue.  As Raygun closes out the Olympics hoisted on the shoulders of other Australian athletes, leading spontaneous breaking sessions in the streets, undoubtedly having a great time, the inevitably of internet fame, being filmed all the time and at least another few days of scrutiny has manifested. Why, people are asking, was her street performance at the athlete’s village yesterday better than her actual Olympics performance? I think it’s safe to conclude, based on the response to this video, that “better” is in the eyes of the beholder.

Rounding out the souring and inevitable curdling of online sentiment are valid questions that return us to how Gunn qualified, how breaking made it to the Olympics in the first place, whether you can “sportify” a pretty underground subculture, and who gets to do that.

As the Sydney Morning Herald story points out, the body shepherding breaking into the Olympics, the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF), wanted to get ballroom dancing into the Games but “kept failing because it was too “outdated”. Instead, they pivoted to breaking as “a youthful alternative”, hiring a lobbyist to mount the case. The story goes on to explain how many breakers weren’t keen on having their sport “Olympified” and that there was something of a scramble to get the “sport” Olympics-ready and organised. Qualifiers were hastily arranged, and the necessary accruements of an official Olympic sport were assembled quickly. The implication is that breaking should stay a subcultural art form and that the WDSF’s push to get it to the Olympics is a cynical ploy. To some, the fact that Australia was repped by a 36-year-old white academic also offers up a pretzel-shaped argument about colonisation. Debate is raging about cultural appropriation. It wouldn’t be a full cycle of internet discourse unless it had also attracted counterclaims characterising the criticism of Raygun and the criticism of the criticism as woke bullshit.

We’ll never know whether Raygun had any clues that her time at the Olympics would serve as a vivid illustration of an internet fame cycle. What started as international ridicule morphed into a celebration of national and generational pride, chased by questions about gender, race, authenticity and commercialisation. The jury is out on whether Raygun has helped or hindered breaking as a sport and/or art form in the long term. Breaking will not be part of the 2028 games in Los Angeles.

The safest ruling, for now, is that the line between genuine achievement and meme fodder is as blurred as ever. The Olympics, with its pursuit of elite sporting excellence, is as indebted to the moments of comedy and pathos that roar up from the masses with their copyright breaches as any other form of entertainment vying for our attention. 

In Phillips’s breakdown of the stages of a Twitter storm, the last is this: “The next day, somebody, somewhere does something bad……and the Circle of Life can begin once again.” Raygun didn’t necessarily do something bad, but the internet is also not sure if it was good. It might be both. Fortunately, someone else will be along to divide and conquer the discourse soon.