Lowe Napalan's Involvement in Rachael Gunn's Olympic Training

Australian Breaking Association president Lowe Napalan has admitted he was barely involved in training Olympic breaker Rachael Gunn in the crucial lead‑up to the Games, as fresh scrutiny continues to swirl around Australia’s controversial breaking campaign.

Napalan, who doubled as national head coach, said heavy administrative duties linked to Australia’s Olympic push meant he could not properly coach Gunn, known in competition as Raygun.

“I was doing a lot more administrative work. In terms of Raygun’s training specifically, I was only there assisting a handful of times,” he said, estimating he attended fewer than 10 sessions.

That distance only grew as Paris drew closer. Napalan revealed he had minimal contact with Gunn in the final months before the Olympics and did not see her full routine until shortly before she stepped onto the Olympic stage.

When he finally watched it from the side of the stage, he said he struggled to hide his reaction. The performance, which quickly went viral, sparked a wave of criticism and mockery online and turned Gunn into one of the most talked‑about athletes of the Games.

Most of Gunn’s preparation had been handled not by the national coach, but by her husband, fellow breaker Samuel Free. After the Olympics, the pair found themselves at the centre of a storm: their roles, their qualifications, and even their path to Olympic selection were pulled apart on social media.

Conspiracy theories followed. Detractors claimed the couple had manipulated the qualification process, allegations that Napalan, Gunn and Free all strongly deny in a new documentary, according to the Daily Mail.

Gunn, for her part, has been blunt about where she stood competitively. She acknowledged that, even before the Games, she knew she did not have the technical level to genuinely threaten the world’s elite breakers.

She went anyway.

“I don’t like to have regrets and I think that I knew deep down if I walked away, I would have regretted it more,” she said.

The backlash since Paris has been fierce, but it has not pushed her out of the scene. Gunn insists she remains committed to breakdancing and plans to keep competing, determined to stay in a culture that has now seen her at both its highest stage and its harshest spotlight.