Politics and dollars snare Australia's golden girl

By GREG ANSLEY herald correspondent

CANBERRA - Just weeks before the 400m race that Australia expects - almost demands - to produce Olympic gold, Cathy Freeman has become enmeshed in politics and the sordid world of money.

The Aboriginal track star, who since her gold-winning debut in Auckland a decade ago has been the untarnished darling of the nation, is now under intense public scrutiny arising from a multimillion-dollar legal action launched by her former lover and manager, Nick Bideau.

The Tax Office, as a spinoff from this tangled web, has presented her with a bill for $A400,000. And, most explosively, Freeman has set aside her previous determination to keep the Sydney Games free of politics by attacking Prime Minister John Howard's refusal to apologise for the stolen generation of Aborigines taken from their families.

Her statement of outrage, made to a London newspaper, has fuelled indigenous intentions to use the Olympics to press demands for social and economic justice. Activists are promising daily demonstrations by crowds of 20,000 before the world's newspapers and television cameras.

Suddenly, the golden girl from the north Queensland town of Mackay has entered the bear pit.

So far sports-mad Australia has, if anything, grasped Freeman closer to its heart, regarding her more as victim than sullied, and enraged that she should be placed under such pressure so close to the race that it expects will produce the nation's sole track gold.

There has been little real reaction yet, even to revelations that Freeman has been talking to American coach John Smith and partner Emanuel Hudson with a view to moving to the United States after the Olympics to join their Los Angeles-based international track team.

Although Australia has yet to realise it, this is the loss of innocence for Freeman, Olympic silver medallist, two-time Commonwealth Games gold winner, two-time world champion, Young Australian and Australian of the Year, Most Popular Sportswoman of 1994 ...

Off the track, her battles are now over money, her advocates professional hard-hitters, her sponsors multinationals and giants of corporate Australia.

And she has finally become outspokenly political, voicing anger she refused to express for so many years as a role model for other young Aboriginals, despite the sometimes bitter criticism of such indigenous activists as Charles Perkins, now a deep admirer.

This week, Freeman let fly. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph in London, where she will be based until the Sydney Games, she launched into the Howard Government.

"My grandmother was taken away from her mother because she had fair skin," she told the newspaper.

"You have to understand that when you have a Government that is so insensitive to the issues that are close to people's hearts, that have affected so many lives for the worse, people are going to be really angry and emotional ...

"I was so angry because they were denying that they had done anything wrong, denying that a whole generation was stolen."

At home, as this sank in, high-powered and expensive lawyers were flexing their knuckles for a bruising fight over the $A3.4 million Freeman has earned since 1997, and the millions more that will flow after the Olympics. Her assets include a home she bought for her parents in upmarket Brisbane, and others in Melbourne and London.

Even before Bideau's legal action has been heard, it has revealed an entirely new side to Freeman, revolving around a broken relationship and the interests of some of the biggest names in sports sponsorships.

In 1990, as a 16-year-old rising star, Freeman attracted the professional attention of Bideau, then a Melbourne-based sports reporter with a talent for picking up-and-coming stars. The relationship blossomed into a long-term romance that also became a business partnership and established Bideau in sports management.

In 1997, the personal relationship ended, but Melbourne International Track Club (MITC) - a joint management venture between Freeman, Bideau and accountant Peter Jess - continued to operate, with Freeman under contract until the end of this year. The main cash flow for MITC came from two Freeman-inspired sponsorships of $A250,000 each from Nike and the Australian telecommunications company Optus, which were used also to manage 26 other athletes on the club's books.

Earlier this year, Freeman declared the contract void and engaged new publicists and managers, who told Nike and Optus to pay the money directly to the runner. Freeman, whose other major sponsors include News Ltd, Qantas, Myer and Channel Seven, has separate sponsorships with Nike and Optus. Her husband, Sandy Bodecker, is a senior Nike executive.

Bideau and Jess allege breach of contract that would destroy MITC and, given that they did not deduct management fees from Freeman's earnings, want a substantial portion of the millions amassed since 1997. Freeman's managers claim in reply that the complex web of trusts established by Bideau and Jess had landed her with a $A400,000 tax bill and isolated her from management of her financial affairs. For the emerging Freeman industry, gold at Sydney will have more than one meaning.