I remember Raygun at the 2024 Olympics.
Of course I do. It felt like the entire internet was talking about her. There was the kangaroo move, the memes, the jokes and the general confusion over what exactly we had just watched.
And yes, I laughed.
Then I watched Netflix’s new documentary Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly, and somewhere along the way, it stopped being funny. Not because her Olympic performance suddenly looked different. There are parts of it that are still objectively pretty funny. But the person behind that performance looked completely different once I knew her story.
And it made me think about something we talk about constantly as content creators. Going viral. I’m not entirely sure we should want it anymore.
Raygun Was a Person Before She Was a Meme
One of the things I appreciated most about the documentary was getting to understand who Rachael Gunn actually was before the world knew her as Raygun.
She was an academic who fell in love with breaking after meeting her now-husband, Samuel Free. She spent years participating in Australia’s breaking community, competing and studying the culture academically before eventually winning the Oceania qualifier that sent her to the Paris Olympics.
That context matters because it wasn’t part of the story most of us received in 2024. Most of us met her through a clip. The internet didn’t hand us years of her life, her relationship with breaking, the competitions she’d entered or everything that had led to that moment. It handed us a woman doing a kangaroo-inspired move on the biggest athletic stage in the world.
And the internet did what the internet does. It turned her into content.
Going Viral Doesn’t Mean People Like You
I think we’ve accidentally made “going viral” synonymous with success. As creators, we watch videos explode and think about the followers, traffic and opportunities that could come with that kind of reach. A million views sounds incredible because we’re imagining a million people enjoying something we made. But that’s not actually what virality promises.
Virality promises attention. That’s it.
You don’t get to decide whether that attention is positive. You don’t get to decide what strangers assume about you. And once your story escapes the people who understand its original context, you may not even get to decide what the story is anymore.
That’s what was so uncomfortable about watching Raygun’s experience unfold.
The jokes quickly became something much bigger. False claims circulated about how she had qualified for the Olympics, including allegations involving her husband and the selection process. The Australian Olympic Committee publicly pushed back against those claims and confirmed that she had been selected through an independent qualification process.
At that point though, the internet wasn’t just laughing at a dance anymore. It was constructing a person, and at a rate that no one could keep up with.
There Is a Human Being Inside the Viral Moment
This was probably the biggest shift for me while watching the documentary. A viral person becomes strangely easy to separate from an actual person. They’re suddenly a character we all share. We make memes about them, stitch their videos, talk about them with strangers and form opinions about who they are based on a few seconds of something that happened to them.
Meanwhile, that person still has to wake up the next morning and live inside the story millions of strangers are telling about them. Rachael has previously talked publicly about how overwhelming the reaction became, including the effect it had on her husband, family and the Australian breaking community. She eventually asked the media to stop pursuing the people around her as the attention continued.
And to be totally honest, watching that part made me uncomfortable and sad. Because I had laughed too.
There is obviously a huge difference between thinking an Olympic routine is funny and sending someone hateful messages or spreading false information about them. But the documentary reminded me how easily a human being can disappear underneath the entertainment value of a viral moment.
Then Richard Branson Did Something Completely Different
This was the part of the documentary that unexpectedly got me. While so many people were using their voices to tell Raygun what was wrong with her, Richard Branson reached out.
Rachael describes receiving a call from Branson after the Olympics. She said he told her he admired her courage and “plucky” spirit and invited her to participate in a Virgin Voyages event with Boy George.
I loved this part of the story so much.
And, not because a billionaire swooped in and magically fixed everything. He couldn’t undo what had happened, and Raygun still had to find her own way through it. What struck me was how deliberately he chose to use his influence. Millions of people had looked at the exact same performance and said, essentially, ‘Look how ridiculous she is.’ He looked at it and saw courage.
Same person. Same performance. Completely different use of influence.
We Have More Influence Than We Think
We usually talk about influence as something you acquire after reaching a certain follower count. But this documentary made me think that we’ve got that completely backward.
If you share something with 200 people and change the way they think about someone, you have influence. If you repeat something you haven’t verified, you have influence. Or if you pile onto a joke about someone who is already being mocked by millions of people, you have influence.
And if you decide to encourage someone when everyone else is laughing, you have influence then, too.
Social media has given ordinary people an extraordinary ability to affect other human beings. That’s one of the most beautiful things about it. It’s also one of the things I don’t think we fully understand yet.
Maybe Going Viral Isn’t the Goal
I’m a content creator. Of course I want people to see my content. I teach people how to become searchable online. I celebrate when something I create gets traction. And, I look at my analytics, watch my numbers and get excited when something reaches more people than I expected.
I’m not going to pretend attention doesn’t matter.
But I think I want to be more careful about treating more attention as automatically meaning more success. Because there is a person on the other side of all those numbers. Sometimes it’s me. Sometimes it’s someone I’m talking about. And sometimes it’s a woman in Australia whose strangest 90 seconds suddenly became entertainment for the entire planet.
What Raygun’s Story Left Me With
The ending of Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly surprised me because I didn’t finish it feeling sorry for Rachael Gunn.
I finished it inspired by her.
She knows she’s different. She knows people still think what she did was ridiculous. She can laugh at herself, and the documentary doesn’t pretend she secretly should have won an Olympic medal. But she also doesn’t seem interested in spending the rest of her life apologizing for being herself.
I love that.
Because maybe the answer to the uglier side of the internet isn’t disappearing from it or becoming afraid to do anything that might attract attention. Maybe it’s remembering that the crowd doesn’t get to decide who you are. And maybe Richard Branson’s small part in this story is a reminder for the rest of us, too.
We talk about the power of social media like it’s something creators are trying to acquire. Raygun’s story reminded me that every one of us already has some.
We can use it to pile on. Or we can use it to throw someone a lifeline.
I’d like to be the person who throws the lifeline.
FAQ
What is Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly about?
Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly is a Netflix documentary about Australian academic and competitive breaker Rachael “Raygun” Gunn. It follows her journey to the 2024 Paris Olympics, the viral reaction to her performance, and the memes, misinformation and intense public attention that followed. The documentary also explores how she rebuilt her life after unexpectedly becoming one of the most talked-about people from the Games.
Why did Raygun go viral at the Olympics?
Raygun became an international viral sensation after her breaking performances at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Clips of her unconventional movements spread rapidly online and became memes, but the attention eventually expanded beyond jokes about the performance into misinformation and conspiracy theories about her qualification for the Olympics.
Did Raygun have breaking experience before the Olympics?
Yes. One of the misconceptions addressed by Raygun’s story is that she appeared at the Olympics without a background in breaking. She was a competitive breaker before the Games as well as an academic whose work included research into breaking culture.
What does the Raygun documentary say about social media?
The documentary isn’t specifically a documentary about social media, but the internet’s reaction is central to Raygun’s story. Netflix itself describes the aftermath of her Olympic performance as involving an “avalanche of memes, misinformation, and conspiracy theories,” making her experience an interesting example of how quickly online attention can change someone’s life.
Where can I watch the Raygun documentary?
Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly is streaming on Netflix. The documentary was released September 1, 2026.
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