Cathy Freeman is a brilliant Aboriginal athlete who seemed destined to symbolise the Sydney Olympics. But politics and a complicated personal life could yet destroy the dream
Duncan Mackay It is a warm, breezy summer night in Turin and the restaurants and bars are beginning to fill up with sharp-suited Italians and their designer wives. An Italian army bus draws up outside one of the hotels, returning its passengers from an athletics meeting at the city+s Parco Ruffini stadium. The party is a mixture of athletes and journalists and immediately one figure stands out: the superfit woman with the streaked-brown hair. Dressed in the full Nike regalia, she looks every inch the sponsored professional athlete. A concerned frown has spread across her forehead. She turns to relay her fears to a tall blond man accompanying her. He is clearly several years older than her but is ruggedly good-looking in a West Coast sort of way. At the track earlier, one of the journalists had been asking questions about him. She had been polite but firm. -No, I won+t talk about my husband to someone I have only just met,+ she insisted. The same journalists were now on the bus and getting off at her stop. Panic swells inside her. She has travelled 20 000km to avoid this kind of attention.
If Cathy Freeman is nervous of everyone she comes into contact with this year it is perfectly understandable. With the Sydney Olympics rapidly approaching, everywhere she goes people are asking questions. They want to know about her Aboriginal background. About her new husband. About the ex- boyfriend she has just dumped as her manager. Just about the last thing they want to know about is her running. In Australia, Freeman is a cross between Princess Diana and David Beckham. -FBI -front, back and inside,+ as one of its journalists put it. -Bigger than Shane Warne, Harry Kewell, Dame Edna Everedge, Rolf Harris and Kylie Minogue rolled into one,+ says another. On September 23 – fitness and form permitting – she will line up in the final of the Olympic 400m as one of the hottest favourites in games history. Yet in many ways her remarkable talent is the simplest aspect of her life. Freeman is an Aborigine and, for that reason, to many Australians she is the transcendent symbol of the whole country. And that places a unique pressure on her. -She has come to stand for the Sydney Olympics,+ says David Rowe, a professor of media and cultural studies at Australia+s University of Newcastle. -She has come to symbolise a painless reconciliation between black and white.+ And that, Rowe argues, is the problem. -She cannot win symbolically,+ he says, -because no individual can carry the weight of what she+s doing.+ Frank Fisher, Freeman+s Aboriginal grandfather, was a sprinter, cricketer and a rugby league footballer. Frank+s son Norman – Freeman+s father – was also a natural athlete. He was known as -Twinkle Toes+ because of his speed on the football field. Cathy arrived 27 years ago, born in Mackay, sugar cane country in north-east Australia. It was a tough upbringing, made all the tougher when Norman left Cathy+s Aboriginal mother Cecelia. Cathy was five at the time, and Cecelia was forced to work long hours as a cleaner to support and feed her five children.
One day Cecelia introduced her children to a man Cathy initially called -that white bloke+. He was Bruce Barber, a railway guard from Brisbane, and soon he was her stepfather. He was determined to help his stepchildren and when Cathy showed a talent for running he encouraged her. When she needed the funds to travel to inter-state competitions he knocked on doors and raffled plates of meat to raise the money to help send her. Freeman soon repaid his faith. At 11 she won Queensland state titles in the 100m, 200m and high jump. By 15 she was telling her school careers officer she wanted to win a gold medal at the Olympic Games. (She was told little Aborigine girls were not supposed to have such ridiculous dreams.) A year later she qualified for the 1990 Commonwealth Games as a 100m relay runner, but was remembered on that first trip overseas as a lazy trainer happy to get by on her natural talent. Still, her fluid, loping style helped Australia win the relay, the first Aboriginal competitor to win a gold medal in athletics. In the aftermath of that success she made her first political public statement. -Being Aboriginal means everything to me,+ she said. -I feel for my people all the time. A lot of my friends have the talent but lack the opportunity.+ Four years later she went one further and won individual gold at the next Commonwealth Games. By now a dedicated 400m runner, she celebrated by doing a victory lap with both the Australian and Aboriginal flags. While many applauded, she was also criticised by some white Australians. Questions were asked in the Australian Parliament. In 1996 at Atlanta she was denied the Olympic gold by the defending French champion Marie-Jose Perec, but a year later she established herself at the top of her sport when she won her first World Championship title in Athens in 1997, and again the Australian flag shared space with the Aboriginal flag. This time there was no dissent back home where Freeman had become the country+s favourite daughter, one who had crossed the racial divide. The Aborigines were gradually and systematically displaced after the British colonisation of Australia began in 1788. They suffered from exposure to new diseases and from discrimination. For the next 200 years their treatment by the white population may have become less brutal but the discrimination has remained. The Aborigines were banned from theatres and other public places in some regions of Australia, and they were not counted in the census until a constitutional referendum in 1967.
One of the most shocking actions was the system by which Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and homes for the purpose of educating them in the white majority+s system. Freeman knows about the so-called -stolen generation+: two of her grandparents were removed from their parents and put in foster homes on Palm Island, off Queensland. The system continued until the 1960s.
There are now about 400 000 Aboriginal people among Australia+s population of 19- million. Although many Aborigines are integrated into mainstream society, and though even prominent Aborigines acknowledge that there has been progress, significant social problems are still the rule for their minority group, including much higher rates of child mortality, unemployment and criminality than in the white majority. For many Aborigines the Olympics represents an opportunity to expose their fate to the world at large, to reveal Australia+s dark secret. And some of them are threatening to use more than the force of argument to do so. -The Olympics are going to be very violent,+ Charles Perkins, an Aboriginal activist, said recently. -We are telling people: please, don+t come over. If you want to see burning cars and burning buildings, then come over, enjoy yourselves. -We+re going to show to the world that Australia+s got dirty underwear. We+re going to expose Australia for what it is: very racist.+
Some activists are expecting equally extreme actions from Freeman herself. As the highest-profile Aborigine competing at the games they are demanding from her the ultimate gesture: withdrawal from the Olympics. For her part, Freeman insists it is an action she will not contemplate. -I+m very much for unity and harmony, unity and diversity,+ she says. -Boycotts don+t work. It would be giving out negative signals. I+d much rather be seen as a young indigenous woman making the most of the opportunities.+
She is a shy, nervous interviewee, but there is no mistaking her depth of feeling. -People say we should be protesting for white people taking our lives away. Why turn around and do the same to one of our own? Everyone deserves to be free. I love my people and where I come from, but I am not at the Olympics to be political. I don+t think to myself that I+ve got to make this next move for the Aboriginal cause. I am at the Olympics to run the fastest 400m of my life.+
Many prominent Aborigines back Freeman+s approach. Others, like the Australian rugby league star turned boxer Anthony Mundine, believe she -is being used+ by the government and the Sydney organising committee to help defuse the Aboriginal issue.
As if things were not pressured enough for Freeman, there have also been the enduring complications of her personal life. Freeman was still a schoolgirl when she was wooed by Nick Bideau, then a 30-year-old sports journalist. At first her family tried to break up the relationship, but they were unable to stop Freeman moving to Melbourne to live with Bideau, where he became her manager, cook, training companion, part-time coach, business consultant – and lover.
With -Prince Charming+, as she called him, Freeman really began to make a name for herself on the international stage, but after seven years their intense relationship imploded in 1997 when Freeman won her first world 400m title. Both sought new loves: Bideau beginning a relationship and having a baby with the Irish distance runner Sonia O+Sullivan; Freeman turning to Alexander Bodecker, an American executive with Nike who, at 46, is nearly 20 years her senior. Yet, Freeman kept Bideau on as manager, a situation that caused tension between Freeman and Bodecker, who became her husband last September. With Bideau devoted to getting the best out of Freeman on the track, and Bodecker devoted to doing the best for Freeman overall, conflict was inevitable. In March, Freeman announced her split with Bideau and the appointment of Alistair Hamblin as her new business manager. Nobody was very surprised. If Freeman ever doubted the enormous pressure on her to win the Olympic gold medal then it was forcibly hammered home at the world championships in Seville last year. After retaining her 400m title she had to run the gauntlet of journalists, photographers and cameramen around the track.
-That was nothing,+ said Freeman, -absolutely nothing, compared to what I+ll be going through at the Olympics.+