MELBOURNE, Australia — Fairy tales don't come any better than this. Close to 110,000 people inside Sydney's Stadium Australia roared their delight and acclaim as the lithe figure in the green-and-white skin suit surged to the front in the final of the women's 400-meter run.
Fifty meters from the line, Cathy Freeman knew she had the race won. All pretensions of style were dropped and she flailed her way to the finish. She opened her ears and heard that roar. "I felt like my bones were vibrating," she recalled.
Ten days earlier, she'd lighted the Olympic flame to signal the start of the 2000 Olympic Games, a moment rife with symbolism and theatrics: the dark, unmistakable face; the body encased in a silver wrap, borne slowly aloft by hydraulics and imagination; the flame, defying water and flaring triumphantly. The torch, on its arrival in the Olympic stadium, passing through the hands of women old and young -- Dawn Fraser, Betty Cuthbert, Shane Gould; Olympic gold medalists all -- before settling in Freeman's right hand.
This image, that Australia's women are its heroes, and appropriately celebrated, was one of two elaborate hoaxes pulled off by the organizers of the 2000 Olympics. The other, it can be argued, was Freeman herself, the focal point of a country that supposedly had made its peace with its original inhabitants, and was now prepared to cede this historic moment to them.
Cathy Freeman was riding history's wave. In May 2000, about 250,000 people had marched across one of Australia's most notable landmarks, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, demanding reconciliation with, and formal apologies to, the aboriginal population of Australia -- the 97% extending a hand to the 3%.
Implicit in this gathering was regret for the wrongs of the past:
* The belief in and practice of eugenics, the scientific study of racial improvement, under which mixed-blood babies and children were taken away from their -- invariably -- aboriginal mothers, to be raised white and proper, as happened to Freeman's maternal grandmother, Alice Sibley.
* The establishment and maintenance of the missions, the ghettos of outback Australia, where the likes of Frankie Fisher, Freeman's paternal grandfather, were kept by order of a Queensland government minister in the 1930s, even though he had an offer of a professional rugby league contract in England.
