Olympic breakdancer left paralysed says Raygun Paris meme backlash was ‘so unhappy’

B-Girl Stefani, who has just won Red Bull BC One Cypher UK again, recalls waking up paralysed in 2017, then competing while pregnant and says the Raygun meme storm was “so sad”

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Anna Ponomarenko, an Olympian known as B-Girl Stefani, has opened up about waking up paralysed, competing at seven months pregnant and her thoughts on Raygun’s viral and infamous performance. Anna, who recently won the Red Bull BC One Cypher UK for a third time and will represent the UK at the World Final in Toronto, Canada, in November, described the morning in 2017 when she woke up in a Turkish hotel room unable to move her upper body.

“I couldn’t move my upper body, my arms, my hands, my head,” she said. “It was kind of like a dream.”

Sh added: “I couldn’t understand what was going on, so I just started to scream and ask for help.”

Speaking on FUBAR Radio, she further told host Claira Hermet on the What The Health?! show: “They called the ambulance and took me straight to the hospital.” Diagnosed with a herniated disc in her neck pinching both nerves in her spinal cord, she was told immediate surgery was essential, but that it would mean the end of her dancing career.

Anna recalled: “The doctors told me it was a really dangerous situation. Because they said the hernia was quite big and it was pinching both my nerves, there was a big chance that it would destroy them and I would never move my upper body again. They told me that we had to do the surgery immediately but that I wouldn’t be able to dance anymore as it’s so dangerous for my neck.

“You can’t be prepared for hearing that. They told me that I could take the risk, not have surgery and slowly recover maybe.

“When they said there is a chance, there is a second option, there is a chance you can recover, for me, it was like, there is just one option: you can recover. That’s it.

“I didn’t hear anything else.” What followed was months of electrical therapy, physiotherapy and painstaking rehabilitation. The breakdancer explained: “The first couple of weeks, I couldn’t move my hands at all.

“I couldn’t move my fingers, nothing. So I was just doing this electricity [therapy] until at least I started to move my fingers a little bit.

“I remember after maybe a month I could take my phone from the table, and it was so interesting because I felt like the one small phone weighed 20 kilograms. It was super heavy.

“But I was so proud that I could take it.” When breaking was announced as an Olympic sport in 2020, Anna was living in London and had already decided it was time to start a family.

What she didn’t anticipate was that the day she found out she was pregnant, Russia would invade Ukraine. She said: “As soon as I started to feel a little bit better with all this situation in my country, the Federation told me there is Olympic Games and we put you in the team.

“And I had to tell them that I probably can’t because I’m pregnant. And it was a shock.

“I’ve been waiting for this all my life, and now I can’t do it because I’m pregnant. Like, seriously?”

After being told by her federation she was no longer in the team, Anna self-funded a trip to Madrid while four months pregnant and won bronze, securing Ukraine’s first Olympic-qualification medal in breaking. She said: “I was just in shock.

“I was so motivated. How strong women are.

“Why are people turning away from us? Like, we’re pregnant, that’s it, bye.

“Like we’re sick. But we’re not sick.”

She competed until seven months pregnant, returned to training four days after her daughter Milana was born, then flew to Japan two months later to qualify and finished fifth in the world, saying sceptics only fuelled her determination. Asked about the viral controversy surrounding Australian break-dancer Raygun at the Paris Olympics, Anna said it was “so sad” what the coverage cost the sport.

“I always try to be as far as possible from this topic,” Anna said. “Breaking is a sport where we don’t have borders.”

She added: “We don’t have boxes of movements. We have so many people with an original style.

“It wasn’t really her fault. This is just the rules which the Federation built, the way the qualifications were set up.

“It’s not her fault that in her country there are not many b-girls.” She concluded: “So many athletes had been getting ready for that, preparing themselves through so much pain, so much time, so much of everything.

“They wanted to show the world how beautiful we are, how amazing our sport is and how much we deserve to be there. And all the world saw was the memes.

“It’s just so sad.”

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