'I could never understand why I smiled at someone and they didn't smile back. I would get really upset – why don't you smile back? It used to devastate me.'
Twenty years later, Cathy Freeman still sits at the end of the track in quiet bewilderment.Now, she has a skimming appreciation of the enormity of what she did. The least of it was to win a footrace.
Since she emerged in Australia as a gifted teenager, sections of the country wrestled with how to deal with the precociously talented runner at a time when a light was being shone on Australia's relationship with its first peoples. At the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada in 1996 Arthur Tunstall, the powerful but controversial Games administrator, thundered at Freeman for celebrating with the Aboriginal flag and an Australian flag during her gold medal victory lap.
The idea of who Freeman was and where she came from was so fundamental to understanding her but also understanding why her victory in Sydney remains so significant.
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