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Cathy's agonising decision: why I quit

By Len Johnson and staff reporters

Cathy Freeman returns to Olympic stadium Sydney to launch the Close the Gap campaign - 2007

16 July 2003 - Cathy Freeman, Australia's greatest athlete in recent history and arguably its greatest ever, has quit the sport.

Saying simply - "my heart's not in it" - Freeman told Australian athletics head coach Keith Connor of her decision in London on Tuesday.

"I've lost that want, that desire, that passion, that drive," Freeman said. "I don't care any more."

Freeman said that the realisation had hit her that her gold medal in Sydney, achieved with the weight of the expectations of 19 million Australians on her shoulders, was a high point to which she could now not return.

"I won't ever have the same fulfilling moment as I already have had," Freeman said.

"I don't have the same hunger.

"I know what it takes to be a champion, the be the best in the world, and I just don't have that feeling right now."

Speculation had mounted about a Freeman retirement ever since she was beaten into fifth place - her worst placing in a 400 metres race for over a decade - in the US just over a month ago.

The winner then, Ana Guevara of Mexico, has inherited Freeman's mantle as world number one since the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Guevara had also beaten Freeman soundly three weeks earlier over 300 metres in Mexico City.

It was not the losses that caused Freeman to rethink her commitment to the sport. It was the fact that the defeats did not hurt her as she felt they should. She was, she said, letting other runners go past her without really caring. To a born fighter like Freeman, that was enough to precipitate a crisis of confidence.

Freeman's manager at IMG, Chris Giannopoulos, flew to London to counsel her four weeks ago. She announced then that she was no longer trying to win an individual 400 spot in next month's world championships in Paris but would remain committed to the 4 x 400 relay.

A big element of that decision was that, should she retire, Freeman wanted to do it at a time of her won choosing.

That time is now.

Not even Freeman's closest athletics advisers were aware of her decision.

Her coach, Peter Fortune, thought she might tell Connor that she was not going to run the relay but that she had still not decided on retiring.

Freeman indicated that the meeting with Connor, at which he had sort some clarity about her relay intentions, may have been the occasion which crystallised the decision.

"I feel OK about it," she said. "It's obviously something that's not been easy to get to the point where I'm at now.

"I felt I wasn't yet ready to say it aloud." Connor said that he was "quite happy" with the decision and was happy for Freeman that it had been made.

"Naturally, I'm disappointed for the team," he said, "but it stops all that 'is she, isn't she, will she, won't she'."

Freeman won the Australian national title earlier this year. She was named in the relay squad but left for the US in May for further training and racing still requiring the A-qualifying standard for the individual event.

Freeman arrived in Europe in early June.

Although she has continued to train, her racing program has been put on indefinite hold.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

The queen is dead, long live the queen - and her knight

By Jacquelin Magnay

July 17 2003 - Cathy Freeman has a knight in shining armour ready to whisk her away to an unknown future.

Just hours after announcing her retirement, Freeman yesterday outed the Australian actor Joel Edgerton as her boyfriend, while insisting he could not be blamed for her decision.

An armour-plated Edgerton is in the Irish wilds spending about 16 hours a day on horseback during the filming of King Arthur.

"I'm a little worried that people will blame my boyfriend, Joel Edgerton, currently filming the part of Sir Gawain for Disney, for my decision to retire," Freeman wrote in The Daily Telegraph, London, yesterday.

"That's rubbish. The fact is, it is - and has to be - my decision. It comes from the heart."

Both Freeman and Edgerton, and their families, have for months denied the true nature of their friendship, but Freeman wrote: "I am not so good at not feeling any more. Things get to me. I'm happier and sadder, more involved in others' lives."

Several people close to the couple say the romance is a recent development. "They were very good friends and just good friends for a long while before becoming romantically involved," one said.

Their first public appearance as a couple was at this year's Wimbledon men's final. Incredibly, no one noticed.

Freeman had dismissed talk about Edgerton after the break-up of her marriage to Sandy Bodecker in February, protesting: "It's amusing, we're great mates." In April, Edgerton flew to Oregon to support Freeman in a race.

She finished fifth and then disappeared with Edgerton for a week to ponder her future.

Her finest moment - winning the 400 metres at the Sydney Olympics - had also been the toughest, and she was only just understanding the toll it took on her.

"It was wonderful, marvellous, the pinnacle of my career. But it was also incredibly traumatic. More traumatic than I allowed myself to feel at the time and slowly but surely I have come to realise that I could not go through all that again."

A close friend, Olympic silver medallist Raelene Boyle, predicted Freeman would involve herself in public life, but warned of a difficult transition. "I imagine Cath will go through a tough time when she watches the 400 metres in Athens next year."

As tributes to Freeman poured in, Labor jumped in to encourage a role in politics. The Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, said: "I think that she is a person committed to reconciliation in this country and using her sport and her presence to advance that cause."

The Prime Minister, John Howard, said Freeman's Olympic victory was "one of the great sporting events of our generation".

"I think she's been a wonderful Australian, is a wonderful Australian," he said from Tokyo. "I don't think there could be any greater accolade for anybody."

Praise also came from the man who had been one of her harshest critics - the former Commonwealth Games boss Arthur Tunstall. His attack on Freeman for draping herself in an Aboriginal flag at the 1994 Commonwealth Games had sparked widespread controversy, but yesterday he said: "She is a great Australian who brought great credit to her country."

Freeman's manager, Chris Giannopoulos, confirmed that her major sponsor, Nike, was sticking by her and that she would still be the face of Melbourne's 2006 Commonwealth Games.

"Cathy is going to think about what she wants to do and right now a holiday sounds good," he added.

Source :The Sydney Morning Herald

A spirit that touches us all

17 July 2003 - Cathy Freeman's retirement came as a shock to many Australians. Tony Stephens looks back on her achievements - both on and off the track - and reflects on how these will endure.

Cathy Freeman said late on that night of nights, day of days, September 25, 2000, well after the race but while the Australian nation remained breathless with the excitement of it all: "I know I have made a lot of people happy, from a lot of different backgrounds, who call Australia home."

She made a lot of people happy, all right. There cannot have been many happier days in Australian history, outside the ending of a world war.

"It's been a dream of mine since I was a little girl and that's why I got really emotional," she said. "Something like this happening to a little girl like me. I've got to grow up sometime."

She grew up a long while ago, of course, but many Australians still think of her as a little girl. Her giggle, nervous manner and her slightness against athletes the size of Marie Jose Perec help explain this. And that so many people pinned such hopes to her, in the way that parents hang hopes on their children.

Good parents will now let her go, rejoicing in her decision to follow her own heart and mind and not urging her to pursue one course or another.

Freeman has almost always made the correct decision and her choice to retire is the right one. "I won't ever have the same fulfilling moment as I already have had," she said. "I don't have the same hunger. I know what it takes to be a champion, to be the best in the world, and I just don't have that feeling right now. I'm tired all of a sudden."

She has left indelible memories. Her "fulfilling moment" was at the Sydney Olympics. Bud Greenspan, the official Olympic Games documentary maker who has watched every Games since Helsinki in 1952 said that Freeman's 400 metres victory that day, only one of seven sparkling finals, provided the greatest day of sport he had ever witnessed.

Most 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.

"The scale of everything during 2000 was beyond description," Freeman said more recently. "I feel special for it, knowing I kept it together. I didn't lose my mind."

Her effort on that night won the admiration of a wider world. Michael Wilbon wrote in The Washington Post: "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."

Yet this was not the only day when Freeman made Australians happy and moved the culture. The Herald took her to the Northern Territory in 1994, not long after she had waved and worn the Aboriginal flag in the most enduring image from the Commonwealth Games in Canada. Freeman had packed her flag before flying to Canada, expecting to have occasion to use it.

At Humpty Doo in the Territory, she met 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. "Cathy is my No.1 hero," Thomas said. "I hope what I'm doing might inspire others," she said.

At Ubirr, in Kakadu, she met Bill Neidjie, the then tribal elder whose people had lived there for about 50,000 years. He declined to be photographed, until asked by Freeman. "Good girl," he said. "You run fast." Down the track, young naked blacks ran into the dusk, arms pumping, heads thrown back, flashing knowing smiles from ear to ear.

Australians have worried about the weight the nation has put on the shoulders of Catherine Astrid Salome Freeman - she prefers Catherine but is happy for Australians to call her Cathy. Yet they love "the smile on her dial", as athletics authority Maurie Plant describes it. They love what Raelene Boyle, the former Australian champion, calls her "beautiful vagueness" and "beautiful toughness". They love her unusual mixture of shyness and confidence, her nervous giggle, the way she stood on her toes to kiss the lofty Perec, who beat her to the gold medal at Atlanta in 1996.

Many Australians love her Aboriginality and the fact she has achieved so much against the odds. Freeman's grandmother, Alice Sibley, was taken from her mother and moved to Palm Island, off the Queensland coast. Freeman's mother, Cecilia, was born on Palm Island and moved 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, suffered with cerebral palsy and died young.

Asked as a young girl why she ran, Freeman said: "I've got a sister who has cerebral palsy and I should make the best use of my good arms and legs." Anne-Maree died in 1990. Cathy wanted to place the gold medal she won that year as a 16-year-old at the Auckland Commonwealth Games in her sister's coffin, but her mother urged: "No, Catherine, you earned it. You keep it."

She doesn't appear to care for fame. Nick Bideau, her former manager, said: "Some athletes want to be famous; some want to be great athletes. Catherine wants to be a great athlete."

"It's the only passion of my life, really," she said of running, on announcing her retirement from it. Yet she said in a Los Angeles Times interview last month: "I just run and I compete and I live day to day. I figure there's a life outside of sport as well and this is just one dimension to who I am, this running stuff."

Running, however, has been Freeman's way of expressing herself. "People draw," she said. "People talk. I don't talk a lot. I don't draw a lot either. When I run, it's not just physical, it's a manifestation of my emotions, of all of the good, of all of the amazingly wonderful times, magical times, as well as those godforsaken, horribly low times that come together that make me do what I do, with all my heart and soul."

Plant said that the path towards her retirement started on that day of days, after the "stress and strain of carrying all the hopes of every Australian ... She probably lost something there because she achieved so much and she carried so much and she did so much for her people, for the sport and, indeed, for the Olympic movement."

Freeman won two world titles, one Olympic gold and one silver medal, an Arthur Ashe Award for courage and humanitarianism and was named by the World Economic Forum last year as one of the 101 "significant leaders of the future".

Now this young woman will consider her future, with a sense of liberation, confidence and the capacity to speak from the heart, often with original thoughts and sometimes by drawing on the wisdom of others. She quotes F.D. Roosevelt: "It is our doubts of today that are our realisations of tomorrow." And someone else: "Example is not one way of influencing others, it is the only way."

Many Australians felt a sea change in attitudes towards indigenous people after Freeman's marvellous double act at the Sydney Games - the gold medal and lighting the Olympic flame. She seemed to have expanded the national consciousness. Reconciliation might have been pushed down the national agenda but Freeman's contribution to it remains undiminished.

I have another unforgettable memory, of Freeman in Redfern, where her spirit went out equally to black and white Australians and particularly to the young, for the athlete knows that the hope is with the young.

An old Aboriginal drunk went to her. The champion held his hand for a few moments and let him kiss her cheek. He urged his white mate - for they were reconciled in drink - to go to her, too. He did, with another wet kiss, from which the champion's cheek was only slightly turned.

"She said she loved me," the white man said afterwards. "She said she loved me. Christ!"

Source:The Sydney Morning Herald

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