Olympics fans watching Cathy Freeman's gold medal-winning run 20 years ago would have recorded it on a VHS tape. On Friday, fans relived the Sydney 2000 women's 400-metre final dash with a recording saved in its newest – and what many hope will be a future-proof – technology, synthetic DNA.

The images of Freeman's 49.11-second dash splashed over the sails of the Sydney Opera House replayed her career-topping achievement but also chalked up a new first – it was archival footage recorded in combinations of nucleotides, mimicking the building blocks of nucleic acids that code life itself.