Australia’s longest minute that united a nation – Sydney Morning Herald

Watching the race again, even for the umpteenth time in the past 20 years, still lifts hairs on the back of the neck, brings the lump to the throat.

Funny thing that? Perhaps, but it had been a wondrous night, a night of nights. Bud Greenspan, the official Olympic Games documentary maker who had watched every Games since Helsinki in 1952, said that Cathy Freemans 400 metres victory that night of September 25, 2000, with six other athletic finals, provided the greatest day of sport he had ever witnessed.

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There was more to it than sport, of course. Freeman had moved Australias culture. Michael Wilbon, of The Washington Post, saw this: It's a halting thing in any walk of life when people are confronted with surreal expectations and meet them. Freeman doesn't see it that way. People who can move the culture rarely do.

This was Australia's longest minute, I wrote that night. This was the breathless, unforgettable minute. The 112,524 people at Olympic Park, a record for the stadium, will never forget it. Few Australians can ever forget it. This was the minute when the nation's heart leapt in the breast and thudded against the ribs like a muffled drum, when the nation's gut churned.

There can never have been a minute quite like it, when so many people, millions, at Homebush Bay, in their homes and public places focused their will and good wishes on a single young woman doing what she loves and does best.

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All the wellwishers in the world could do nothing for her. They could only hope for great things, while fearing disappointment. They could only hope that the weight of their love for her solitary crusade would not weigh her down. It did not.

Many Australians can still see her winning that race, in their mind's eye, with her 2.33 metre-long stride that matched the size of her heart. They can picture her sitting cross-legged with relief on the track afterwards, her lower lip quivering. They remember her handing the winner's bouquet of native flowers to her ecstatic mother.

Freeman had made what must have been one of the happiest days in Australian history, outside the ending of a world war. Why had she so captured the hearts and minds of Australians? First, Australian track and field athletes win few Olympic gold medals.

Then, more significantly, theres the history, hers and her countrys. As a little girl, she had dreamed about winning Olympic gold. That's why I got really emotional, she said after the race. Something like this happening to a little girl like me. I've got to grow up sometime.

Cathy Freeman with her gold medal for the 400 metres.Credit:Rick Stevens

The young woman had achieved so much against the odds. Her grandmother, Alice Sibley, was taken from her mother and moved to Palm Island, off Queensland. Freeman's mother, Cecilia, born on Palm Island, was taken to Woorabinda, another Aboriginal mission.

Freeman's father, Norman, a brilliant footballer, battled alcoholism and diabetes and died of a stroke at 53. Her sister, Anne-Marie, died with cerebral palsy in 1990. Cathy had said: I've got a sister who has cerebral palsy and I should make the best use of my good arms and legs.

Freeman hung the Aboriginal flag in her room at the 1992 Barcelona Games, when she missed out on the final. She took it to the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada, waving and wearing it after taking the 400m gold medal. It was an act of defiance. Games rules said that only one national flag could be flown.

The front page of the Herald on September 26, 2000.Credit:Archive

Soon after, the Herald took Freeman to Humpty Doo, in the Northern Territory, to meet Harold Thomas, the flag's designer. She thanked Thomas for the flag and he thanked her for flying it. Until her triumphant laps in Canada, the flag had rarely been seen as a symbol of victory. Freeman changed its image forever.

By Sydney 2000, she had tied the Australian and Aboriginal flags together and nobody could deny her the right to wave them in a victory lap around the stadium. After the medal presentation ceremony, she sang the national anthem with the biggest accompanying choir ever assembled in Australia.

Reconciliation had been pushed down the national agenda before the Games and has again since. The Uluru Statement from the Heart languishes; Closing the Gap stumbles before yawning gaps; 435 Indigenous Australians have died in custody since the royal commission ended in 1991, without any charges laid.

Yet Australians felt a sea change in attitudes towards the first Australians after the Games opening ceremony, that acknowledged the history, and Freemans marvellous double act she had also lit the Olympic cauldron to open the Games. The numbers of Indigenous doctors, academics, authors, artists, dancers, lawyers and footballers grow. Cathy Freeman expanded the national consciousness. Her contribution to reconciliation.

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Tony Stephens is a Walkley Award winning journalist, editor and author.

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Australia's longest minute that united a nation - Sydney Morning Herald