Pressure? What pressure?

Gold medalist and Australian 400-metre runner Cathy Freeman knows how it feels to compete in a home Olympics

If anyone in the world knows the intense pressure Chinese athletes like hurdler Liu Xiang are feeling in the lead-up to these Games, it’s former Australian athlete Cathy Freeman. Before the Sydney Olympics in 2000, Freeman was, like Liu, the host country’s only real gold medal hope in athletics. The hype was intensified by her being an Aboriginal Australian, especially since the dominant political question in the lead-up to the Sydney Games concerned Australia’s treatment of its native people. Freeman became a cultural icon and the focus of everything the Sydney Games were supposed to represent. Luckily, she won, becoming the first Aboriginal to win a gold medal and creating the defining moment of the Games when she pulled away from the competition in the final stretch of the 400 metres, wearing her now famous green bodysuit.

So does she feel sympathy towards athletes like Liu? "No," she tells Time Out, laughing, which she does a lot of during our interview. "Jeez, it’s not like we’re all heading to a funeral. It’s the Olympic Games, and of course there’s pressure； otherwise why are you there? If you’re a top class athlete, it should be part of your make-up to handle all that." But for all Freeman’s brashness, she admits that it wasn’t easy. "I remember the warm-up a few hours before the race in Sydney. After everything, you’re suddenly all alone," she says. "I remember feeling vulnerable and scared, and just thinking, ‘Oh God’ – all your fears and feelings about everything just come up. I said to my coach, 'Will you still love me if I don’t do this properly.'"

But it wasn’t just Freeman’s coach who had expectations of her. For months, she had been the focus of endless debates about Aboriginal rights and the subject of the most intense kind of jingoism. Her gold would be a symbolic political moment as well as a sporting success – she just had to win. "It was hard because I’m basically just a shy person and I’ve never wanted to make news or be a star; I’ve always wanted to run and I never signed up for all this other stuff. But before the Games, I didn’t have a choice. I’d stop at a red light and people in the car opposite would be screaming 'Go Cathy! You beauty! We’re all on your side!' And I’d turn on the radio and hear the commentators getting so excited about my race, and I’d think, 'Oh gosh, I’m not sure I want to know about all this.' It would have been easy to run away from it all, but I accepted peoples’ good will and used it to my advantage. And I accepted the fact that people would talk about my heritage."

She says focusing on the race helped her turn off from all the hype. "As a little girl, I learned mental rehearsal and visualisation from my stepfather. It’s all about confronting your fears – you can’t dismiss your fears but you have to manage them and use them. When I was by myself in my house, I’d try and imagine what I would be seeing, hearing and feeling on the day of the race. It wasn’t as much about the race itself, which I’d prepared so much, it was more about things like accepting the medal on the day and standing on the podium hearing the national anthem."

Of course, she won, and "our Cathy’s" position as an Australian national treasure was assured. After retiring following the Games, she has remained very much in the public eye, making numerous public appearances, speaking on Aboriginal rights issues and starting the Catherine Freeman Foundation to help under-privileged children achieve success. "There was a moment when I said to myself: 'Freeman, what are you doing? You have to grow up. You have to take responsibility. You have to accept that you have a place in peoples’ hearts and minds.' You can’t waste that."

That she’s still an important cultural figure in Australia is testament to what an Olympic gold medal can do, as Liu Xiang already knows after winning gold at the Athens Olympics in 2004. Liu now faces the weight of 1.3 billion people willing him to win in a home Olympics – let’s hope he handles the pressure as well as Cathy Freeman did.

Toby Skinner