Cathy Freeman OAM (b. 1973) was eight years old when she won her first race at a school athletics carnival in north Queensland. Aged sixteen, she was selected for the Australian women’s 4 x 100m relay team that took out the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Auckland, making her the first Aboriginal athlete to win a Commonwealth gold medal. She won two more gold medals at the Commonwealth Games in Canada in 1994. The first Aboriginal track and field athlete to represent Australia at the Olympic Games, she won a silver medal in Atlanta in 1996. She was ranked first in the world in her signature event, the 400m, in which she won back-to-back World Championships in 1997 and 1999, and, memorably, the Olympic gold medal in front of her home crowd in Sydney in 2000. The Catherine (now Cathy) Freeman Foundation was established in 2007 to enhance educational opportunities for Aboriginal children.
This photograph was taken at the NSW Academy of Sport in December 1994. As Denis Montalbetti and Gay Campbell noted: 'It's irrelevant how many times a person has been photographed. Our aim is to create unique images of them, to be part of their testimony … a part of their photographic history.'
Gift of the artists 2003
© Montalbetti & Campbell
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