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.
The sight was both symbolic and awe-inspiring. Catherine Freeman, a young Aboriginal woman closing in on a race that would captivate the nation, appeared at the Sydney 2000 opening ceremony and took hold of the Olympic torch. Dressed in a white lycra suit, the champion runner from Mackay held the torch aloft, absorbed a delightful reception at Stadium Australia, walked up a set of stairs and trod into a pool of water. She then lit a ring of fire, igniting a cauldron that would elevate around her and above the stadium, where it would hold the Olympic flame throughout the Games.
Freeman’s splendid opening ceremony moment, which lit up the Sydney sky 10 days before her gold-winning 400m dash, was a symbol of reconciliation for a rapidly changing Australia. A powerful conversation regarding Indigenous Australia and White Australia was happening in homes, classrooms and workplaces, and here was an Aboriginal woman giving society a glimpse of how life could look if people like her were embraced.
“For me it felt like there was something incredibly ceremonial and important about Cathy being the one who actually lit the cauldron,” Larissa Behrendt, the chair of the Community Spirit Foundation, told the ABC.
Watch the video at the top of the page to see the moment Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic cauldron at the Sydney 2000 Games!
“It was a surprise for all of us,” Uncle Jack Charles, the revered Aboriginal actor and elder who died in 2022, said in an ABC interview.
“[We were thinking], ‘Oh look, she’s lighting the cauldron, for Christ’s sake!’
“I didn’t show much emotion, but I was secretly admiring that a black woman, a slip of a girl, was lighting the cauldron, the Olympic cauldron. That’s a big deal.”
Ten days later, Freeman gazed up at the cauldron after completing her victory lap.
“I lit that!” she said with a laugh, the Australian and Aboriginal flags draping over her.
“It’s been a real kick, a very big honour to be asked to do it. I couldn’t reject, even though I gave the AOC [Australian Olympic Committee] every chance to change their mind. They had every confidence in me that I was the right person for the job.”
As many would remember, the lighting of the cauldron went terrifyingly close to becoming an international debacle. For almost four agonising minutes, the cauldron refused to continue rising. The only moving it did was wobble. The flame, which had travelled from Olympia in Greece and been relayed to Sydney by 13,400 torch-bearers, went precariously close to going out.
But Freeman kept her cool — the cool of a two-time world champion and soon-to-be Olympic gold medallist — and before the eyes of 3.7 billion people, disaster was averted.
“I declare open the Games of Sydney, celebrating the XXVII Olympiad of the modern era,” bellowed the voice of Sir William Deane, Australia’s governor-general at the time, as the flaming cauldron ascended and fireworks exploded.
The first of Freeman’s landmark Sydney 2000 moments was complete.