Freeman
eyes gold in 200 and 400 metres at Manchester
Greg Buckle (Reuters)
5 March 2002 – Melbourne, Australia - Australia’s Olympic 400 metres
champion Cathy Freeman said on Tuesday she wanted to win the 200 and 400 metres double at
this year’s Commonwealth Games.
“I am fired up. I can see it happening, running the 400 and 200 metres in Manchester,” Freeman told a news conference.
“I’m really on target. I’m just taking each day as it comes. The most important thing really to me is that I’m actually loving it in a way that I’ve never loved before.”
Freeman won the 200 and 400 double at the 1994 Commonwealth Games and missed the 1998 Games because of injury. She was 400 metres world champion in 1997 and 1999.
The 29-year-old said she was driven by improving on her winning time of 49.11 seconds at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
Freeman said her first thought after finishing her victory lap in Sydney was her race time was too slow.
Her personal best is 48.63 when she won silver behind France’s Marie-Jose Perec at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. German Marita Koch’s world record is 47.60.
Freeman, the Aboriginal athlete who lit the cauldron to open the Sydney 2000 Olympics, took a year off after the Games because of the pressure of winning gold, and briefly flirted with the idea of retirement.
Now looking ahead to the Athens 2004 Olympics, Freeman made a low-key return to competition at a state meet in Melbourne two weeks ago, winning a 100 metres heat.
She was a close second to Australia’s national 200 metres champion Lauren Hewitt and fourth in the 100 metres at the Victorian state championships last week and will contest the 200 metres in Thursday’s Melbourne Track Classic, an IAAF Grand Prix II meeting.
“My hamstrings are sore. I’m getting massaged tonight. I’ve got training this afternoon,” Freeman said, adding she would not contest the 400 metres on Thursday because her body wasn’t ready for it.
Freeman admitted she had been 65 kilograms when she resumed training in November and was now down to 54, two kilograms above her racing weight.
“Training hard is really the thing, I think,” Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal sports star said.
Australia’s national selection trials are in Brisbane in April.
Freeman said she felt she might struggle to run a place on Thursday in the 200 metres.
“If you saw my race in the 100 at the state titles you would see I have a lot of work to do,” she said.
American Olympic 400 metres silver medallist Alvin Harrison said he was confident of setting meet records in the 200 and 400 metres on Thursday.
Harrison, 28, ran 44.75 in an Australia domestic meeting in Newcastle last month. It was the world’s leading time in the event this year, more than a second outside Michael Johnson’s 1999 world record of 43.18.
