Cathy Freeman will be carrying the weight of Australian expectations at the Sydney Games. Not only that, but there is the question of a messy court-case with a former manager and boyfriend … STEVEN DOWNES spoke to the 400m runner about how she squares her Olympic dreams with the pressure of fame.
It was less than a week after the 1995 IAAF World Championships in Göteborg, and Cathy Freeman was having trouble getting motivated to train. Having led the 400m finallists into the home straight, she faded, and left Sweden without any medal at all. "Tell me," she said to a friend who was trackside at the training session, "what was the biggest disappointment in your life?"
Göteborg remains the only time Freeman has been to an international championship and returned without an anticipated medal. "I never want to feel like that ever again," she said. "Ever."
Yet now Australia's most famous athlete is on the verge of a date with destiny which demands nothing less than an Olympic gold medal in Sydney.
The 1997 and 1999 IAAF world champion at 400m is easily regarded as the host nation's best - perhaps only chance - of winning Olympic gold in Stadium Australia. Tickets for the night of the women's 400m final on September 25 were the first to sell out when Sydneysiders got their chance to buy into the Olympic dream. The weight of expectation is cruelly heavy, and Freeman seems to have been running for cover since the beginning of Olympic year.
First, she left Australia unexpectedly at the beginning of May, arriving with her training kit in Los Angeles for a short stopover with coach John Smith's stellar group (Maurice Greene, Jon Drummond, Inger Miller et al).
Her unexpected move came just after Marion Jones had skipped to the top of the 400m world rankings, and Freeman's getaway was interpreted as a panic response. "I don't like having a slower time than anybody," Freeman admitted.
Barely a month later, she was in Bath, England, teaming up with the training group of fellow world champion, Colin Jackson. Finding suitable training partners was a problem, though. Soon, she flitted to another group in Windsor, the royal town just outside London which is famous for its castle and 400m runners.
Being in Europe for the summer track season has been a welcome escape for Freeman. "I love the fact I'm not well-known here," she said. "Here it's more peaceful. Sure I hear about things from my mother, she'll call me up and say, 'What were you thinking?' and she worries for me, but I'm pretty unaware of the rest of what's going on."
Freeman is only half joking when she says: "I'd be bored if there wasn't a little drama in my life."
For if Freeman is to have an optimum build-up to the Sydney Games, she needs to be spared the controversies she attracts in Australia. When she jetted to America, she also changed her manager, leading to a still-unsettled court case over a contract dispute. "I just thought it was time to take a bit of control," she explained. "From when I was young, things were done for me and I just let people do it for me. As I've grown older, I've realised there are things that I can actually have more input into and do more decision-making."
Freeman's position in all this was made more emotionally charged, though, by the fact that she is being sued by one of her former co-managers, Nick Bideau. Bideau was also a former coach and boyfriend, and the man who discovered the teenage sprinter with world-beating talent in Mackay, Queensland, more than a decade ago.
While Freeman has become famous, the contradictions in this shy young woman having a high profile have brought added pressures. Fame has opened doors for her, seeing her meet the Dalai Lama and Bill Cosby (a former college track star), while she turned down the chance to meet Princess Diana and Hillary Clinton. She says she loathes her status as someone who is instantly recognised in Australia, "I don't like people looking at me; I hate the attention." Since winning an Olympic silver medal behind France's Marie-Jose Perec in Atlanta four years ago, Freeman has rarely felt able to venture out alone when in her own country.
Like superstars in any sport, the life of Cathy Freeman has become the stuff of soap opera. As a former Australian of the Year - the highest civilian honour in her country - and her aboriginal background have made the sprinter an object of intense political interest, too.
After winning the first of her Commonwealth Games titles in 1994, the woman who has "Cos I'm free" tattooed on her arm, carried the aboriginal flag - black, red and yellow - around the track, attracting a rebuke from one Australian team official. It earned her widespread sympathy and front page headlines. Then, when Freeman spoke of the "Stolen Generation" of aborigines in an English newspaper interview this July, the woman who tries to avoid attracting attention was the lead item on Australian television news.
Freeman's family, like all native Australians, was affected by their government's policy of enforced assimilation into the European community. "My grandmother was taken away from her mother because she had fair skin. She didn't know her birthday, so we didn't even know how old she was when he died," Freeman told the London Sunday Telegraph. You have to understand that when you have a government that is so insensitive to the issues that are close to people's hearts, that have affected so many lives for the worse, people are going to be really angry and emotional.
"I was so angry because they were denying they had done anything wrong, denying that a whole generation was stolen. The fact is, parts of people's lives were taken away, they were stolen. I'll never know who my grandfather was, I didn't know who my great grandmother was, and that can never be replaced."
Yet Freeman has resisted calls from activists for her to boycott the Sydney Games. Earlier this year, she appeared in a Nike television advertisement in Australia in which she seemed to snub the aboriginal slogan of "Sorry", attracting the disapproval of her peers. Cathy Freeman, it seems, cannot win, unless she is on the running track, where she has suffered only one defeat since the 1996 Olympic final.
As well as becoming famous, Freeman has become rich from her running. Even before she won her first world title in 1997, she had acquired four houses around the world, and a support team that included a cook and housekeeper as well as the modern athlete's constant companions, such as a manager, a coach, Peter Fortune, and an accountant. In October 1999, Freeman also got herself a husband, when she and Sandy Bodecker were married.
"Money makes life easier but I don't want to be rich, not at all," Freeman said, with all the ease of someone who has no money troubles. But when she does become too complacent, Freeman finds that a visit home to her mother brings her right back to earth. "It makes me realise how much of a bitch I can be sometimes the way I carry on. I'm so lucky. All I have to do is run."
If only winning a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics would be as straightforward for Cathy Freeman.