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.
As Debbie Flintoff-King rounded the second-last bend and entered the home straight, she at best appeared a chance of scraping a medal. With just two sets of sticks left to jump in the final of the women’s 400m hurdles at the Seoul 1988 Olympics, the 28-year-old with a fluffy blonde mop of hair was placed fourth, trailing a Russian and two East Germans. Any hope she’d harboured of winning gold had vanished over the first three quarters of the lap, or so it seemed.
She leapt over the first of the remaining two hurdles in fourth place, but simultaneously edged past East German Sabine Busch to move into third. After she jumped over the final hurdle in third place, her spikes pressed into the track and she almost instantly opened a gap of several metres on the other East German, Ellen Fiedler, exploding into second place. And although she had done astonishingly well to force her way that far through the field within such a short distance, Russia’s Tatyna Ledovskaya was still in the lead and Flintoff-King had only 30-odd metres to reel her in.
Watch the video at the top of the page to see Australian hurdler Debbie Flintoff-King’s incredible comeback victory at the Seoul 1988 Olympics!
In a desperate sprint for the finish line, the girl from Frankston in Melbourne’s south-east, scrapping for a gold medal in South Korea, mowed down Ledovskaya and, dipping at the finish line, nudged out the Russian by the barest of margins: one hundredth of a second.
Flintoff-King had pulled off the inconceivable and done it in Olympic record time, stopping the clock at 53.17 seconds.
Since Flintoff-King’s triumph in 1988, only two Australians have won Olympic gold on the track: Cathy Freeman and Sally Pearson.