Some media reports claimed it as a gesture of reconciliation, but with Freeman increasingly aware of her status as a role model for the Aboriginal community, her decision was surely more about representation. That driving force proved powerful – in 1994 she won double gold at the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada – but controversy also followed, when she carried both the Australian and Aboriginal flags on her victory laps. At the funeral, Freeman swore that every race she ever ran would now be for Anne-Marie. However, just three days later, tragedy struck at home with the death of her sister. They won, making Freeman the first-ever Aboriginal Commonwealth Games medallist at the age of just 16. In 1990 she made her first national team, as part of the Australian 4x100m relay team at the Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand. By then she already held national titles in the high jump, the 100m, 200m and 400m. She ran, and ran, and won and won.Īnd so, by the age of 14, when she told her high school careers advisor that her only goal was to win an Olympic medal, it may not have seemed quite so far-fetched. One of her primary school teachers raised money for her to attend the state primary school championships and even bought her a pair of running spikes. From her first race at eight, she was hooked. No one could ever accuse the young Cathy of being slow out of the blocks – she began athletics at the age of five, under the tuition of her new stepfather, Bruce Barber. Their father was a less happy influence – an ex-Rugby League player, he started drinking heavily and behaving violently, and the couple divorced in 1978. Freeman had three brothers and an older sister, Anne-Marie, born with cerebral palsy, who spent much of her life in a care facility. Her mother was a cleaner at the local school and a strict disciplinarian – banning her kids from eating junk food and raising them as strict Catholics. But to become – and to live with being – an icon who transcends sport, who is cast as bringing together an entire nation and symbolising the dawning of a new era? That was anything but effortless.Ĭatherine Astrid Salome Freeman was born in Mackay, Queensland in 1973, to Cecilia and Norman Freeman, both Aboriginal Australians. It’s something that comes really naturally and I’m good at it’ – how effortless she makes it all sound. Few athletes have ever carried the heavy weight of symbolism and expectation so lightly around the track. Why Cathy Freeman’s 400m Gold at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney was a performance of enormous symbolic powerįew moments epitomise grace under pressure so elegantly as the Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman in her sleek green, white and yellow bodysuit surging to 400m Olympic Gold in front of an adoring home crowd.
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