Raygun is World No. 1, Olympic flameout be damned.
The World DanceSport Federation clarified its ranking of Rachael Gunn, the controversial 37-year-old Australian B-Girl, on Tuesday, a day after it was revealed she held the top spot.
Raygun famously failed to earn a single point in her three round-robin matchups in the preliminary round of the Paris Games in August, with a much-criticized routine that included a “kangaroo” dance and enraged hordes of fans.
That performance, however, didn’t factor into the WDSF rankings — neither did the Olympic qualifiers in May and June — as ranking events were not held from Dec. 31 2023 through the Paris Games “in alignment with the Olympic Qualification System,” the Federation said in a statement.
“This strategic scheduling allowed athletes to focus solely on the last part of their Olympic qualification without the added pressure of additional ranking events,” it said. “Consequently, by the end of the Olympic Games, many of the competition results included in the ranking had expired, leading to the current situation where many athletes have only one competition result contributing to their ranking.”
The result was Ryagun’s No. 1 ranking with 1,000 points earned from a first-place finish at the Oceania continental championships in October 2023.
She wasn’t the only source of controversy from the WDSF rankings — B-Girl Riko, ranked No. 2 due to her top finish at the Breaking for Gold World Series in Hong Kong in December 2023 with 1,000 points also caught the attention of the community — though the rankings give preference to Raygun’s win.
Rayon’s points will expire on Oct. 28, while Riko’s will do so on Dec. 16, with the rankings set to change following the WDSF Breaking for Gold World Series in October.
Not that the dancers put much stock in them, anyway, as breakers only participated in the WDSF events to qualify for the Olympics, according to Zack Slusser, vice president of Breaking for Gold USA.
“Speaking of the WDSF, they actually don’t have any real merit with the breakers or the breaking community,” Slusser told the Associated Press. “And they also haven’t been able to organize events by their measure that would contribute to creating an accurate world ranking.”
Breakers, Slusser added, “had no incentive, no desire to even continue participating with the WDSF” after getting enough points for Paris.
“Because they’re not cultural events,” he said. “They are not enjoyable.”
