PARIS – One by one, the breakers emerged in baggy pants and bandanas, crop tops and durags, tracksuits and backwards caps, oversized T-shirts and classic hip-hop drip.

And then there was Rachael Gunn, B-Girl Raygun, dressed in the standard uniform of Australian Olympians, shirt tucked in like a 36-year-old college professor – because she is one.

“I didn’t get the memo,” Gunn told Yahoo Sports, “that we weren’t going to represent our country’s colors. What’s going on?”

She said this and much more with a wry smile. She was fully aware that she looked, acted and was out of place. In a field full of world champions and teenagers with braces, she was an outsider: a former ballroom dancer with a PhD in cultural studies and a day job at Macquarie University in Sydney.

“Look, I went to the event with the expectation that I would not be able to vote,” she said.

And she didn’t, losing her three round matches 18-0, 18-0, 18-0 when the women’s breaking competition began on Friday.

Instead, she relied on her “unique style” – which many viewers, perhaps rightly, interpreted as a little.

She grabbed her regular Australian green baseball cap. She hopped on stage and pumped her fist in the air. She flexed her muscles and wiped the soles of her granny-white sneakers. She glided across the floor with the grace of, well, a gym teacher. At one point she flopped around like a fish.

“You see, everyone has a different breakdancing style,” she said.

So she did something that resembled a crab walk. She did a handstand that wasn’t quite vertical. She did some basic downrock breaks, but she had nothing in common with the acrobatic power moves of her competitors.

“My style is not really suited to these events,” she said. “You see the dynamics and a lot of really fast footwork, power moves, freezes and things like that.”

But she was pretty damn good for a woman who only started breakdancing in her mid-20s, through her husband. Pretty good for someone from Australia, not exactly a hip-hop hub. She qualified because she was the best in Oceania.

“I’ve never performed on such a big stage,” she said. “There are no events this big in Australia.”

And she’s far from a full-time breaker like some of the other Olympians are. According to her bio on the Olympia website, she spends most of her time lecturing and researching dance, gender politics, and the “dynamics between theoretical and practical methods.”

So she beamed after six rounds in the break, even after she had left the competition without a vote.

“It was incredible. Such an incredible experience,” she told Yahoo Sports outside the La Concorde venue. “What a stage, what an arena, what a crowd. The music was amazing. So, hh, so, so grateful for the opportunity.”