Australia's women's water polo team snared an incredible gold medal victory in Sydney in 2000. Long before that final, those determined Australian women had defied the odds to get the sport played in the Olympics at all | app85
But not just because of Higgins' heroics. This was a team - and a sport - which had had to win twice to be on the podium, wearing gold.
For most of the second half of the century, the world’s best women’s players campaigned for inclusion. But every Olympic cycle, they were left disappointed. Armed with the intel, Australia’s goalkeeper Liz Weekes headed a small group – including one of her best friends, Higgins – who drove to the media event with a simple goal. They would crash the press conference and hand over a letter requesting women's water polo be added.The IOC suits were leaning towards adding a team synchronised swimming event instead.“The people just turned on me and I was about to step backwards and go back out,” Weekes says. “I thought, ‘Oh God, I can’t do this’.
“I remember getting a phone call at work one day out of the blue to let us know we’d been successful,” Australian star Bronwyn Mayer says. “It was incredible for that to happen because I really thought it was a lost cause.”After the 1998 World Championships in Perth made famous for Ian Thorpe breaking the 400-metre freestyle world record as a 15-year-old, Hungarian Istvan Gorgenyi was offered a choice: take either the Australian men’s or women’s team to the Olympic Games.
“The tough stuff is fun, but to actually focus on the nakedness of breasts we were like, ‘Oh, good on you boys’. So as a team we decided to boycott their show.” He was a volunteer bus driver, often taking the water polo officials to and from venues. His role also included occasionally ferrying around the American women’s team. He struck up a bond with a few of their players, who would line up against his daughter for the first-ever Olympics gold medal match for women.
“I was a hard person to talk to and Istvan said to me on our walk, ‘I wanted to tell you I’m not going to start you in the line-up. I know you’ll be upset with me, it’s not because you’re not performing it’s because I want the Americans to forget about you’,” Higgins recalls.Having played the round robin and semi-finals at the fit-for-purpose Ryde Aquatic Centre – on a suburban street down the road from a funeral home and used car yards – the women were thrust onto centre stage.
The match itself was a struggle, “slow and heavy” as Higgins recalls. No game had fewer goals all competition.
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