This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
This year marks the silver jubilee of the Sydney Olympics, perhaps the best Games of the modern era apart from London 2012. Over the next three months, this column will revisit some of the stories that made the Games so memorable, starting here with the local heroine.
Before the storm of an Olympic final, there’s a moment of perfect calm. A second, maybe two, between the set command and the gun: the athletes held quivering on their fingertips, the officials watching like hawks, the crowd silent and expectant.
Very rarely, that moment extends through an entire nation. 8.10 p.m. on Monday 25 September 2000 is one of those times. In the posh suburbs north of Sydney Harbour and the rough areas of West Melbourne, in the red heart of Alice Springs and the suffocating humidity of Darwin, all Australia holds its breath as Cathy Freeman settles in the blocks, a single lap from glory or despair.
She has a silver medal from Atlanta four years ago, but this is her turf and time alike.
Wherever you look — on billboards and buses, in newspapers and magazines — you see her, equal parts expressive, beautiful and determined. In her are vested not just a nation’s hopes but its fears, guilt and shame too: for Cathy’s Aboriginal, and her people’s past treatment is on everyone’s minds. This country once routinely separated Aboriginal children (including Cathy’s own grandmother, Alice Sibley) from their parents and didn’t give indigenous people the right to vote.
As a Queensland schoolgirl, Cathy would win races but see the white runners she’d beaten get the medals anyway. A few months before the Games, 250,000 people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge in reconciliation, and “SORRY” was projected onto the Opera House. These things, this history, these stains: they die hard.
Cathy has long blazed a trail for her people. After winning the 400m at the 1994 Commonwealth Games, she ran a lap of honour with the Aboriginal flag alongside the national one. “It’s no big deal. It’s not a non-Australian flag. It’s an indigenous Australian flag. Being Aboriginal means everything to me.”
Now she stands on the start line. Her hooded bodysuit is striped in Australian green and gold, and her spikes are Aboriginal red, black and yellow: the two halves of her in perfect symphony, as always. The other seven athletes are in tops and shorts. Only Cathy is dressed like a superhero.
In her mind are the words of Billie Jean King, another pioneer: “pressure is a privilege”. “The race of our lives,” said the Sydney Morning Herald this morning. “There has been no single occasion where more has been expected of an Australian sportsperson.” Pressure indeed: but privilege too, if you’re that superhero.
Cathy’s in lane six, with her two main rivals, Britain’s Katharine Merry and Jamaica’s Lorraine Graham, in three and four respectively. They come to their marks. 112,524 people inside Stadium Australia and 20 million outside it hold their breath. That moment: the pause, the hiatus, the cusp when everything is still unknown. And then the gun fires and thousands of camera flashes sparkle like fireflies and the crowd noise goes straight through you and they’re out and running.
Into the back straight, the stagger still holding, Cathy running well within herself. Up to halfway, with Graham gone out fast and pulling Merry with her as they dive into the second bend: both of them on Cathy’s inside, in her eyeline, just ahead of her. So tempting to go with them and burn her matches: so hard to stick to her race plan amidst the maelstrom and the adrenalin. But Cathy knows it’s about smarts just as much as it is desire, and she holds and holds and holds: holds her discipline and her pace and her nerve.
Into the home straight. Graham’s strides shortening, Merry’s shoulders tightening. Cathy still running fluid and strong and powerful. Comes up to them. Lifts. Passes them. Fifty metres to go and she knows and they know and the crowd knows and God! The noise! She pours it on, going away from the chasers with every stride, hammering across the line as though smashing through a brick wall. “What a legend!” says commentator Bruce McAveney. “What a champion!”
And then she unzips her hood, shakes her head and crouches down unsteadily. The tsunami of noise breaks over her in vast waves, pressing her down, and it’s all she can do to soak it in and wait it out. For more than a minute she doesn’t move, apart from acknowledging the congratulations of those she’s conquered.
“What a relief,” adds pundit Raelene Boyle.
Finally Cathy rises cautiously, like a diver wary of the bends. She asks an official if she can do a lap of honour, not presuming even now that she has the right. She takes two flags as usual, an Australian and an Aboriginal and suddenly she’s dancing with photographers swarming around and all Australia dances with her. When in the crush one of the snappers falls over, she’s the first to check he’s OK and the first to smile when he confirms that he is.
“What’s happened tonight probably won’t make much difference to people’s attitudes or to the politicians,” she says. “All I know is that I made a lot of people happy.”
That and the rest: because for 49.11 seconds she had put Australia entire into dreamtime.
