She is a runner. She runs footraces and trains hard for them. She has done this her whole life, before being an Aborigine meant anything to her, before the Australian government began to clean up its act, before she became the world champion in the 400-meter run, her specialty at this Olympics.
Some athletes create their own cause and run with it.
That was Muhammad Ali. That was John Carlos and Tommie Smith, raising clenched fists as the national anthem was played at the Mexico Olympics, raising awareness around the world as to how bad race relations had become in the United States, irking teammates and countrymen in the process. Freeman is not in that group. She has sought none of this. She simply carried an Aboriginal flag along with an Australian flag after a televised race in 1991, an act of spontaneous celebration of who she was and where she was from.