In 2026, The Big Issue celebrates its 30th birthday – the perfect time to revisit our fave stories from the past three decades. Like Cathy Freeman – not really an underdog, but definitely one of our fave cover stars.
Freeman has fronted our magazine twice (in 2000 and again in 2010), appeared on the back cover of our very first edition ever (in 1996) and made it into our long-running Ozzities column in 2023…
Ozzities: Cathy Freeman Wins the Sydney Olympics
By Sinéad Stubbins
Some months are ordinary and then other months you light an Olympic torch and then 10 days later win a race in front of 8.8 million people. That probably hasn’t happened to you, but it has happened to Cathy Freeman.
The Sydney Olympics were in full swing and everyone in Australia was desperate for 27-year-old Freeman to win the women’s final 400m sprint. There was constant media coverage. There was even a giant picture of her adorning the side of a tower block near the Sydney Harbour Bridge. She probably could have been voted Prime Minister if she wanted the job. All this silliness somehow didn’t faze her. “I wanted to be an Olympic champion and I didn’t care about the goings-on around me,” she told The Howie Games podcast in 2017. “In my heart and with all of my soul I was ready…I had a deadly sense of self-belief.”
Freeman was born in Mackay, Queensland in 1973. Her mum Cecelia belonged to the Kuku Yalanji people, and her dad Norman was a Birri Gubba man. One of her grandmothers was part of the Stolen Generations. “I didn’t know who my great-grandmother was, and that can never be replaced,” she once said. “All that pain is very strong and generations have felt it.”
Before the Sydney Olympics, Cathy Freeman was already pretty famous. In 1990, she became the first-ever Indigenous Commonwealth Games gold medallist, aged 16. She won two gold at the 1994 Commonwealth Games, and carried both the Australian and Aboriginal flags on her shoulders after her wins. Australia’s Commonwealth Games boss, Arthur Tunstall, tried to ban her from carrying the Aboriginal flag ever again. Prime Minister Paul Keating sent her a telegram saying that he thought it was a cool thing to do. In her 2003 autobiography, Freeman wrote, “I took the flag and draped it over my shoulders like a cape and trotted off. I wanted to shout, ‘Look at me, look at my skin. I’m black and I’m the best.’”
On 25 September 2000, in front of 112,524 spectators – the largest attendance in Olympic history – Freeman entered the stadium looking like a superhero in her custom-made, aerodynamic bodysuit. “It didn’t feel like my feet were even touching the ground,” she told SBS. “I felt like somebody had put a cloud under my feet.” She won the race in 49.11 seconds, and carried both flags around the stadium as everyone cheered. It was the most watched TV event in Australia’s history – until the Matildas played England in the World Cup semi-final.
Freeman’s win was recently featured in a Yes campaign ad ahead of the referendum. “We have a chance to be part of a moment that brings people together,” she said. “To stand together and to show our support for Australians who need it the most.” This month, 23 years to the day since Freeman lit that Olympic flame, the NSW Government announced
that a stand at Accor Stadium is now named after her. It’s the first major grandstand in the state to honour a female athlete.
“This is about my family,” she said. “The community I belong to, and of course the ancestral lines that go back so long and so deep and rich.”
First published Ed#696