10 years on from Freeman's victory - 2000 Sydney Olympics

Wow, to think that 10 years ago, Sydney was hosting the Olympics and the whole of Australia was in sports and nationalistic delirium. Nick Bryant of the BBC has yet again given a perfect retrospective of the Games and its legacy, highlighting the possible scenarios that London and the UK could face leading up to, and following, the 2012 Olympics.

One of the most important points made by Bryant is that the Olympics signified the startpoint of Australia's ongoing jingoistic nationalism, something I have been trying to pinpoint for quite some time. Forever since blinded by the spell the success and praise the Olympics had on the nation, when Australia was overcome with immense civic pride and 'flying the flag' became second nature, Aussies have become what was previously uncharacteristically nationalistic. National symbols such as the flag and the boxing kangaroo, which were hardly to seen outside of major sporting events like the cricket, became mainstream and even fashionable. As Bryant quotes:

Struck by the new-found prominence of flags and face-paint nationalism, the journalist Jennifer Hewett pithily observed that Australia's traditional "mute stoicism" had been replaced by an "open patriotic eagerness". According to James Curran and Stuart Ward, the authors of an excellent new history, The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire, Sydney suggested that Australians "had shelved their traditional suspicion of overt nationalistic behaviour by revelling in frantic flag-waving".

This eagerness was quickly promoted and harnessed by the ruling Liberal Party under the leadership John Howard which assisted them to two further electoral victories in 2001 and 2004. The long-term effect has been that all aspects of Australian society have had to adopt and incorporate this crass form of national pride into their discourse, despite its polarising, isolationalist and underlying racist nature that it seems to encourage.

The most significant moment at the Sydney Olympics for most Australians was when Catherine Freeman was the first Aborigine to win an individual Olympic gold medal for Australia, in the womens 200 metre sprint. The moment itself is subject to much controversy and was hijacked and exploited. Nevertheless, this deep down was a great personal victory for Freeman herself.

Let's get through the muck first. First of all, Freeman, whose fascinating family history was covered in an episode of the first Australian series of Who Do You Think You Are, had her identity taken over from day one in that she is rarely referred to by her real name - Catherine, the name all of her friends and family call her. Instead, to Australia she is 'Cathy Freeman', a name she detests, but nevertheless rather symbolic of how she was subject to the whims of others. Despite much success worlwide in her talents as a sprinter, most of white Australia only found out about her when in 1994 Commonwealth Games, after winning the women's 200m, controversy raged when she celebrated her win by waving the Aboriginal flag and not the Australian flag. The then rather opinionated Head of the Australian Commonwealth Games team criticsed Freeman for waving the Aboriginal flag. Freeman drew much scorn from the Australian public and media for this, giving an excuse for many to let out their latent racism towards Aborigines. However, after she consequently won the 400ms, she waved both the Australian and Aboriginal flags as a compromise.
The Australian media later were to make much of a 'great rivalry' between Freeman and her main opponent, France's Marie-José Pérec. The French woman won the 200ms at Atlanta in 1996, but with the Olympics on Freeman's home soil in 2000, the Australian public were wanting no less than gold from 'their girl'. Such was the pressure that the Australian media went into overtime in rubbishing Pérec when she was in Sydney. The extent of Australian media harrassment and the accompanying media-generated hostility towards Pérec in the lead up to the race against Freeman was so intense that she was forced to quit the Olympics prior to the race and return to France. This was seen as a great 'victory' against the 'evil' Pérec in the eyes of many Australians. What was not widely reported that Freeman was horrified by this as, despite media reports, she was good friends with Pérec and they actually enjoyed a friendly rivalry. Freeman later ran and won the 200m, much to the joy of the Australian public.

The Australian public and media saw Freeman's lighting of the Olympic flame at the Opening Ceremony and her subsequent victory in the 200ms as a great achievement and a symbol of reconciliation. But that was just it - symbolic. By using 'Cathy' as the face of the most watched event in the world, gave the false but powerful image that Australia's Aborigines are fully integrated and respected in Australia. In other words, how could Aussies be possibly racist then... we have 'Cathy' Freeman.

But there was always someone who never bought this imposed image - Catherine Freeman herself. Freeman's articulation, on first impressions, is how many Aussies would like their Aborigines to appear - simple, naive and vulnerable. However, they are all fooled. Freeman is actually very perseptive, displays great intuition and intellect, and is extremely capable of using what may seem her outward vulnerabilities to subtely and unsuspectingly attack public expectations of what is accepted as 'correct'. One of her unsung crowning moments where she displayed this tactic was when interviewed after winning the 200ms at Sydney. In what could be best described as yet another example of 'multicultural window dressing', a fact not lost on Freeman, she was interview by the only mainstream Aboriginal TV presenter in Australia, Ernie Dingo. He did exactly as was expected from such a set-up situation - focus on how much her winning means to Aboriginal Australia and to reconcilliation. Freeman was going to have nothing of it and didn't play along with this charade of whitewashing over 200 years of the systematic holocaust of Aborigines. When asked about what she was thinking about when running the race, which Dingo encouraging her to say something of significance to Aborigines, Freeman in her own innocent style totally avoided the 'Aboriginal Australia' aspect that was expected from her and instead spoke the truth:

(To paraphrase): 'Well, when I was running, I saw my brother on the side and I saw him smiling and he hasn't smiled in years so I was happy that he was smiling'.

Catherine, I love you for that answer! What Freeman said with that answer is she ran as a human being and not as a person to be used to say that all is well with Australia's treatment of Aborigines.

Despite Dingo's many stubborn, and ultimately embarrassing, attempts to get Freeman to say something as clichéd about Aboriginal reconciliation as his questions, it was to no avail.

Freeman has also given measured but well-timed digs at her then growing personality cult. Later in 2000, at the Australian Sports Personality of the Year, as expected, she won the big gong, but when begrudgingly accepting the award, she potently said that 'there shouldn't be awards like this'.

Freeman retired in 2003 and since then has kept a reasonably low profile (especially compared to many, less-accomplished, retired Australian athletes), though she has made appearances on such TV shows as 'We Can Be Heroes/The Nominees' (a great satirical dig at the 'Australian of the Year' award, of which Freeman is a past recipient) and on Salam Café, a fringe TV show on SBS featuring Australian Muslim comedians. Her appearance on the show produced what would be the best line in the whole series from one of the comedians; when asked about her trademark running bodysuit (pictured below), based on which one of the comedians described Freeman as the first gold medalist to win wearing hijab, she was asked 'did your husband make you wear that?' Freeman's final comments on the 'Who Do You Think You Are' episode also displays her great intellect and how she is, to use the jingoistic clichés that go hand-in-hand with the Olympics, more than just gold medal material.

If only we could have more athletes like Catherine Freeman who transcend the political, social and commercial manipulation that the Olympics have been subject to since its 're-inception' in 1896. As Bryant describes:

No other event, forum or theatre, whether military, diplomatic, commercial, cultural or sporting, has presented such an opportunity for the country to assert itself so unambiguously in terms of its own choosing.

In a sparsely populated and occasionally neglected country, with a sometimes fragile sense of self-esteem, few aspects of national life have delivered more uncomplicated joy than the sight every four years of a group of athletes heading abroad and returning with a haul of gold, silver and bronze - international sport's highest currency of success.

This applies to many nations. Instead of wars, we have had the Olympics to assert national pride. I personally prefer this to warfare, but I would like to see this happen in good measure and cleanly.