Tuesday is the 20th anniversary of the supernova that was the Sydney Olympics. Of the gold medal to beat all gold medals. Of the Australian sporting moment to beat all Australian sporting moments, featuring a fiercely free and strong and caring and authentic athletic spirit. I could waffle on here about the atmosphere and the tension and the noise and the hopes and the dreams and the fears and the euphoria of that springtime Sydney evening but it all boils down to this: September 25, 2000, was inspiring stuff. Dreamlike stuff. Life-affirming stuff. Heroic stuff. Deep-and-meaningful stuff. It was truly, and I do mean truly, legendary stuff.
You can have Bradman, Thorpe, Laver, Court, Ablett Sr, Ablett Jr, Warne, Gould, Elliott, Cam Smith the footballer, Cam Smith the golfer, Cuthbert, Elliott, Fraser, Gilmore, Rosewall, Goolagong, Ella, McKay, Peter Thomson, Jeff Thomson, anyone else you care to think of in Australian sport. I’ll take Catherine Freeman as the best we’ve ever had.
Her recollections of the race of her life, the race that properly stopped the nation, the race of all our lives, have been honest and starry-eyed and sincere and moving. Overdue commentary? Heck, yes! But her words are golden about the race that started with her finding a bum, to use horse racing parlance, staying on it, going hard but not too hard, then going like the clappers about 120m from home. Going to a quicker pace, going to a higher place, taking us with her.
If your memories have dimmed, watch the documentary. If you’re too young to know anything about it, watch the documentary, and good on you for reading a newspaper. If you were there and want to go jogging down memory lane, watch the documentary. You will get a tingle, and you will need some tissues.
A snippet. Says Freeman on the race of all our lives: “I’m feeling good. I’m feeling quiet. I’m feeling silent. I’m feeling strong. I’m feeling sharp. I’m not having a lot of contact on the ground. My body is feeling amazing. I’m cruising. I’m feeling light. I’m feeling fantastic. I can feel the sunshine out of my chest. The movement, the sprinting, and just that sense of flight – nothing else matters in those moments. They call it time. It just feels like a whole series of being in the moment. It’s like sheer bliss.”
Another snippet. Says Freeman on the race of all our lives: “I feel like I’m being protected. My ancestors were the first people to walk on this land. It’s a really powerful force. Those other girls were always going to have to come up against my ancestors. For the first time, I feel the stadium, I feel the people, I feel the energy. I feel like I’m being carried. I know exactly what I need to do. I know how to do this. I can do this in my sleep. I can win this. Will win this. Who can stop me?”
More snippets. Says Freeman on the finish to the race of all our lives: “I actually feel like someone has put me on a cloud and I can’t even touch the ground. I don’t even feel my feet touch the ground. This is a feeling I’ve never experienced before. The moment I’m airborne across the line, I think to myself for the first time, so this is what it feels like to be an Olympic champion.”
The only thing more brilliant than Bruce McAvaney’s commentary would be Freeman’s. Two decades later, here it is. When she goes to her haunches on the track. The “dense” and “thick” and “impenetrable” explosion of euphoria from the stands is “almost too much to bear.”
Her thoughts right then? “We all carry some sort of anger or fury or sadness or pain.” She sits on the track and takes off her shoes and socks, grounding herself lest she float off to the stars.
Remember Winx? That little beauty got off lightly during her winning streak. Freeman overcame more pressure and hype and expectation than Winx ever copped, and she was human enough to understand the magnitude of it. Winx won 33 straight races in four years. Freeman won 41 of 42 races from 1996 to 2000. She had one home Olympics, one race, 49 seconds in her lifetime to do something extraordinary or fall flat on her face. It could have been the greatest flop in history.
Footballers freak out about the intensity of one-week build-ups to grand finals. Freeman had two years of it. But not only did she have that heaven-sent free-flowing technique, the heels-to-backside naturalness of it, but she had the temperament to handle what she called her “beast” of pressure. The pressure she could “absolutely taste in the air.” The complete vulnerability of being alone in a race. Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar is the only other athlete I’ve seen under Freeman-scale pressure. But he had 10 teammates to lean on. And a lot more than one innings.
Says Freeman of her walk to the starting blocks: “I just sense that I’m all alone.” One voice distinguishes itself. Some random bloke yelling out, “You can do it, Cathy!” Mate, good call. But it’s Catherine. She looks to the night sky “as if to say, help me!” She talks of the electricity in her fingertips. The electricity in her brain. The electricity running down her spine and into the tips of her toes. What a night, what a night, what a night.
Every seat, taken. Every pub, packed. A raucous, deafening, crowd of 120,000 aside the stadium. A global TV audience in the billions. In the middle of it, a tiny 27-year-old, five-foot-nothing, 50-something kilos wringing wet, tough as teak. Worth her weight in gold.
Notes from the doco: Celebrating with the Aboriginal and Australian flags at the 1994 Commonwealth Games was just about the most heroic thing she ever did. It wasn’t one or the other, it was both, united. When she earned the ire of officialdom, she said, “With all respect, I don’t care.”
Her eldest sister, Anne-Marie had cerebral palsy. She died in 1990. “Gee whiz, the things she taught me,” Freeman says. When Freeman looked at the sky in Sydney, with all respect, gee whiz, I hope it was Anne-Marie looking down on her. And this quote: “I was a kid who was quite embarrassed to be a black kid. An Indigenous kid sort of grew up with that self-image. I could never understand why, whenever I smiled at someone, they wouldn’t smile back. I used to get really upset. I thought, why don’t people smile back at me! Quietly, it really devastated me.”
And the moral to the story: The Indigenous kid who couldn’t get white people to give her a smile, who ran to “be in a light,” who felt like she was “flying” in races, who found “true peace” and “complete freedom” and “a slipstream that leads you straight to heaven” when she ran, ended up making her entire nation grin from ear to ear, from the Great Sandy Desert to the Great Diving Range. Now she shies from publicity and fanfare while running the Cathy Freeman Foundation. It helps Indigenous kids do what she did. Dream big. What a contribution to society. Her dream factory.
She looked at us all going berserk two decades ago and it felt “like a dream.” She thought how grand it was for us to be “so at one” and “together.” Freeman and the Olympics showed how united, as a nation, we could be.
I have three post-Sydney memories of Freeman. One: she was at a Fox Sports breakfast. Unbelievable. What’s a legend like you doing in a place like this? Her humility and decency and kindness was breathtaking.
Why the impact? I’m not sure. There was something light and lovely and good about her. She seemed angelic to me. She was ushered to the top table in the room. She looked embarrassed and giggled and said to the organisers, are you sure you want me to sit here?
Two: the 2014 NRL grand final. She was back at the Olympic Stadium for the first time since her lap from the gods. She was supporting the South Sydney Rabbitohs and in particular, her Indigenous brother, Greg Inglis, whose goanna-crawl after the match-sealing try would become a spine-tingling moment in itself. I saw Freeman skipping along a corridor in the depths of the stadium. I asked her for a quote. She looked shocked to be recognised despite this being the house that Catherine built.
She had held this place in thrall, she had held it in the palm of her hand, and now she was laying low. Come on, I said. Just one quote! Give a sports hack a break! Go Souths! Go GI! Any quote you want! Said Freeman, please don’t think I’m being rude. Said Freeman, I’m so, so, so sorry. Said Freeman, tonight has nothing to do with me. I don’t want anything to be about me. I should have finished the sentence for her: “Ever.”
Three: it was this year’s Australian Open semi-finals. Ash Barty versus Sofia Kenin. The VIPs walked to their seats near Rod Laver’s. Inside Rod Laver Arena, they’re decent seats! A jolly woman in a white suit went floating down the steps. From behind, I could not tell who it was. She was happy and talkative and exuberant and the aura was so strong I could feel it from the media seats. She turned around. It was Freeman.
What a treasure. What a national treasure. Every time I see her, I think the same thing. There she is. The best we’ve ever had.
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