Freeman calls time on career

Olympic 400metres champion Cathy Freeman has retired from athletics.

Australia’s head athletics coach Keith Connor revealed Freeman had decided not to run the 4x400m relay at next month’s World Championships in Paris and to quit immediately.

“She’s not going to compete at the world championships and she has in fact retired,” Connor told the Australian Associated Press.

“It’s very sad news for the team and for us in athletics, very sad news that she’s retiring. But it also puts an end to speculation as to what she was going to do.”

Connor, who stopped over in London to talk to Freeman about her intentions on his way to the Australian training camp near Ostia in Rome, said she no longer had the desire to compete at the top level.

Freeman said the realisation had hit her that her gold medal in the Sydney Olympics, carrying the weight of the expectations of 19 million Australians, was a high point to which she could not return.

“I won’t ever have the same fulfilling moment as I already have had,” Freeman told The Age newspaper.

“I don’t have the same hunger. I know what it takes to be a champion, to be the best in the world, and I just don’t have that feeling right now. I’m tired all of a sudden.

“I’ve lost that want, that desire, that passion, that drive. I don’t care any more.

“It’s obviously something that’s not been easy to get to the point where I’m at now. I felt I wasn’t yet ready to say it aloud.”