To mark 100 days from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Nine.com.au asked you what your favourite Olympic memories were in a survey. The response was overwhelming! We chose 50 of them to re-live, one a day, before new memories are made in Paris. Scroll on for today’s memory.
Crippled by anxiety at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics, Kieren Perkins decided midway through his 1500m heat to ease up. He could escape the overwhelming pressure by failing to qualify for the final, he thought to himself while tracking the black line. But when Perkins, the event’s reigning Olympic gold medallist, touched the wall and peered up at the timing board, he saw he had qualified.
Over the hours ahead, he would be shaken to the core. The thought of fronting up again horrified him. Self-doubt spread like poison. A fear of failure strangled him. He was worried sick that anything other than victory would drive away his sponsors, or his coach, or even his family.
Watch the video at the top of the page to see Kieren Perkin’s iconic victory at Atlanta 1996!
Perkins hadn’t only battled in his heat; the Brisbane swimmer had battled for two years. He had become so fixated on the Atlanta 1996 final that his concentration on the present moment waned.
“As a consequence, I just wasn’t working at the same level of intensity that I had previously,” he told Wide World of Sports ahead of the postponed Tokyo Olympics.
In an indication of his embattled lead-up to the Atlanta Olympics, he failed to qualify for the 400m freestyle, despite being the world record holder at the time and the silver medallist in Barcelona four years earlier.
The public had no idea Perkins was drowning in anxiety during the Atlanta Olympics, but it did know that lane eight, the lane traditionally designated to the slowest qualifier, and a lane typically only filled by a swimmer making up the numbers, belonged to him.
The beep sounded, and 14 minutes and 56.40 seconds later, Perkins touched the wall first to win gold.
“There are moments when I think, ‘Where did that come from?’,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020.
“It is still hard to believe.”
It was a crushing victory, too; his closest chaser, Australian teammate Daniel Kowalski, finished more than six seconds later.
Wearing a gold cap and a pair of budgies sporting “Australia” on the back, Perkins sprung out of the pool and thrust his arms above his head.
“I’m in lane eight. It’s the same water as the rest of the pool. I’ve just got to get in there and do it,” he had told himself while gazing down at the pool before the final.
“There are eight of you on the starting blocks from the entire world, eight who have been honing their talents before being whittled down and brought together to race. You have to understand how to be mentally tough to race in that situation. That separates the people who win and those who lose by one hundredth of a second.”
What followed was an Olympic gold medal win etched in Australian sporting folklore.