Cathy Freeman

Cathy Freeman is an Australian Aboriginal former Olympic sprinter whose three-decade competitive career produced her 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics 400-meter gold medal — at the September 25, 2000 Olympic 400-meter final at the Sydney Olympic Stadium, after she had lit the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics ceremonial torch at the September 15, 2000 opening ceremony 10 days before. She was born Catherine Astrid Salome Freeman on February 16, 1973, in Mackay, Queensland, Australia, into an Australian Aboriginal Kuku Yalanji family. Her father Norman Freeman was an Australian Aboriginal Aboriginal Australian Rules Football player who abandoned the family in 1978, and her mother Cecelia Freeman was an Australian Aboriginal homemaker.

Her education at Fairholme College in Toowoomba, Queensland (1986–1989, on an athletics scholarship) launched her early-career Australian-Aboriginal-athletics public profile. Her 1989 Australian under-16 200-meter title at age 16 — and her subsequent 1990 Auckland Commonwealth Games 4x100m relay gold medal at age 17 — launched her early-career Commonwealth-Games public profile.

Her 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games 200-meter and 400-meter gold medals — across which she ran a victory lap holding both the Australian flag and the Aboriginal flag (which produced controversy with the Australian Olympic Committee and the Australian government) — launched her mid-1990s Australian-Aboriginal-athletics public profile.

Her 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics 400-meter silver medal — behind French sprinter Marie-José Pérec — and her subsequent 1997 and 1999 World Athletics Championships 400-meter gold medals (Athens and Seville) launched her late-1990s international 400-meter public profile. Her September 25, 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics 400-meter final victory at the Sydney Olympic Stadium — produced 18 days after she had lit the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics ceremonial torch on September 15, 2000 — produced her 21st-century Australian Aboriginal-and-Olympic public profile. The 2000 Sydney Olympic 400-meter victory lap (which she ran with both the Australian flag and the Aboriginal flag) was watched by approximately 110,000 attendees in the Sydney Olympic Stadium and approximately 350 million international TV viewers. She married Australian businessman Alexander Bodecker in 1999 (divorced 2003); she married Australian businessman James Murch in 2009.

Her name Cathy is the English diminutive of Catherine (from the Greek Aikaterinē meaning "pure"). Cathy was a popular American girls' name through the 1950s and 1960s.