It was the only gold medal Olympic Games boss Juan Antonio Samaranch presented at the Sydney games. And the only one recovered by a TV camera crew in a supermarket carpark after it was stolen in a home burglary.
"They were standing outside my house waiting and they're like, 'where did you leave that medal?' They knew where I used to keep it and it wasn't there," Burns says. "And I was like, 'just where I always have it'.
"It was something that had felt a part of me," Burns says. "To not have it was unusual, but it made me a bit more philosophical that I had that win inside me. I thought, 'I might not have the medal, but I have that experience'. I felt really sad to not have it, but I tried to move beyond that."Less than a week before Christmas, the switchboard rang at Channel Nine's Melbourne headquarters.
There are more lavish places to do your shopping, but Jones had been around long enough to know the best gifts sometimes come badly wrapped. "It was just before Christmas and they said, 'c'mon, we want to buy our little bloke some Christmas presents'. Then they said, '$1000'. I don't know why but I said, '$900 as a reward for returning it'. They said, 'yeah, OK. Fine'.""I had to go to the handybank and get out the $900 from an account my wife didn't know I had," he laughs, later confessing that night to how he accessed the money.
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