The Electronic Telegraph Monday 20 January 2003 Martin Johnson
Compared to the size of the nuggets they once used to mine here, the Ballarat goldfields now yield barely enough to keep the local dentists in fillings, but this old prospecting town 70 miles north-west of her adopted city of Melbourne nonetheless seemed an appropriate venue for Cathy Freeman's return to competitive running. With someone, somewhere, about to take a match to Athens' Olympic torch, the women's 400-metre gold medallist at Sydney got back to the track on Saturday for the first time since helping Australia to a relay gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in August, and for the first time in her own country for 10 months. The combination of an upper-leg injury and her decision to stay at home to nurse her husband through a successful rehabilitation from throat cancer has left Freeman a long way short of race fitness, but while the quality of the opposition here was a couple of notches down from Birchfield Harriers, she was less concerned with blowing away the opposition as a few cobwebs. Ballarat (pop 83,000) does not often supply more than a modest sprinkling of mums and dads for local club meetings, but there were an estimated 3,000 people here to watch Freeman contest the 200m individual and the 4 x 400m relay. Turning out for the Ringwood club, Freeman won the first by a distance in a leisurely 24.7sec, and running the third leg of the relay, turned a 15-metre deficit into a 40-metre lead at the final changeover. While typically Australian in providing - even in outback country - a state-of-the-art all-weather synthetic track, the venue itself was more reminiscent of a school sports day, and you half expected the afternoon to be launched with an egg-and-spoon race. First up was, in fact, a men's 400m hurdles, which had to be aborted with the runners almost on their blocks when someone realised the obstacles had been set to the girls' height. There was the usual quota of lost-children announcements, along with several more of the typical small-club meeting variety, such as: "Can we please have a volunteer to rake the long-jump pit." Freeman's presence made it a bit like one of those up-country, one-day cricket matches England used to play on Ashes tours, when David Gower and Ian Botham would walk out to bat from behind a hot-dog stand, and the MC would make excitedly parochial announcements like: "And opening the bowling from the Piggery End is Stormy Gale, hoping to put the wind up the Poms!" This was Alf Tupper land, where the Tough of the Track would join his race half a lap late after being up all night welding for his mean-spirited employer, and, pausing only to finish off his fish and chips, would hurtle over the winning line past some snooty upper-class twit with a monocle. As with this meeting, there was no photo finish, or electronic timing - just some bloke in a long white coat shouting: "Tupper wins!" Freeman was the object of only modest attention as she warmed up, from a couple of local television stations and the representative of the Ballarat Courier. She changed in a converted equipment shed, and at the end of her races, like every other competitor, she had to collect a ticket confirming her time and position from a man sitting in a high chair, and report to a small brick outbuilding to hand it in to the official race recorders. It was a pretty hot day, with spectators having a few problems keeping the flies off their hot pies, and only a modicum of shade away from the small main pavilion. There was a single Aboriginal family in attendance, sitting under a bush, but Freeman's heroine status in this country has cut through more colour barriers in a few years than anyone else has in the rest of Australia's 200-year-old colonisation. And, as ever, she was more exhausted by the autograph signing sessions than her exertions on the track. Freeman is still a couple of kilos above her racing weight of 53kg (8st 5lb), but plans to shed that by the time she begins running in a series of eight national meetings starting in Brisbane in April, before moving to America and Europe ahead of the World Championships in Paris in August. All being well, she will go on beyond Athens 2004, and bring down the curtain on her career at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006. Freeman said afterwards that she was pretty happy with her running, even though a strong headwind had prevented her from going below 24sec in the 200m. "I feel fantastic, really strong. It's just a great feeling to be healthy, and to be out running against other athletes again." Otherwise, like most Freeman press conferences, it was mainly an exercise in cheerful giggling, and whatever-pops-into-her-head answers that only occasionally strayed into the same area as the original question. If she does, as has been suggested, eventually go into politics, Australia's equivalent of Jeremy Paxman will end up a gibbering wreck. She is too shy, and far too open and honest, to be a politician, and her advisers wisely steered her away from questions about the Australian cricketer Darren Lehmann, recently suspended for making racist remarks. Neither were the unsentimental Australian media especially excited about the equivalent of a Derby thoroughbred appearing in the 4.15 at Uttoxeter, and Freeman's return rated a single paragraph in the 'In Brief' section of the Melbourne Age. As far as Freeman was concerned, however, it didn't matter how far down the ladder this was, she just wanted to feel her feet on a rung. Eamonn Condon [EMAIL PROTECTED]
