She's the gutsy, graceful girl who stopped a nation when she raced for Olympic Gold. And now, the little girl who raced around the local track in tropical north Queensland is a sporting legend.

It was the grace in her motion he noticed first. The way she moved as she strode the dirt running track, barefoot but determined... willing herself to keep going, absolutely, until there was nothing left to give. Then, there was the fire in her eyes.

To Catherine Astrid Salome Freeman, 12, nothing else mattered. Not the tragedies of her family's past, nor the fact there had been times when her mother could barely scrape together the money to put food on the table. One way or another she would one day run in the Olympic Games.

As her stepfather Bruce Barber watched her run lap after lap around that dusty track in a Mackay park in the mid-'80s, he decided Cathy would have her dream, even if it meant breaking down a few doors himself. "She reminded me of a champion racehorse, just the symmetry of her movement," Barber said years later. "I didn't know anything about style or technique, but (I thought) at least I can try to get her fit."

He might not have had the first clue about how to train a potentially élite athlete but Barber knew how to hustle. To raise the funds to get his stepdaughter on the road to her destiny, he sold lamingtons door-to-door when he knocked off each night from his job on the railways. He organised meat trays and sold tickets around the pubs and clubs. He organised country dances. Once, he raffled a 200-litre drum of petrol.

And the teenage Freeman, a descendant of the stolen generation, the product of a broken home, the child who sobbed whenever she visited her handicapped sister at a special home, looked up from her family's modest Burston St home and knew one day it would all be hers. "The people up the hill had brick houses, fancy fences, nice gardens and big wooden doors," she told her biographer Adrian McGregor in A Journey Just Begun, published in 1998. "I thought anyone who had a car, a telephone or a carpet was rich."

But Cathy's life wasn't all just running. Cathy, or Catherine as her family knows her, was the quiet pixie in a huge gaggle of boisterous cousins that roamed Mackay making their own fun. They did everything together: Running, playing rugby league in local parks, spending long lazy weekends "mucking around" at their grandmother's house or going to a movie.

Cousin Roya Collins says: "We'd muck around and sing into our hairbrushes to Abba songs, or pretend to be in Young Talent Time. I was Karen Knowles and Catherine was Tina Arena. For a shy girl, she was a real performer around the family. And she was always good at everything she tried. Christmas Day at Gran's was always a gigantic party with more than 60 relatives cramming the backyard. "Every Christmas, Cath's mum made her play the organ in front of everyone. She was actually really good but she hated every single minute of it," Roya says. "Catherine was shy compared to the rest of us."

The girls, Cathy, Roya, Tracy Battersby and Erica Hall, would often head to the local park to throw a ball around or just laze around on the grass and gossip. Says Roya: "We'd kid around and pay each other out. With all us around Catherine never got a big head. If she did we'd bring her down so fast, and nothing has changed, not even now she's achieved so much."Every legend has its beginnings, and Cathy Freeman's is both dreadful and dynamic, truly intriguing and of course inspirational.

Her paternal stock is steeped in Aboriginal tradition, and perhaps best characterised by her grandfather Frank Fisher, a Maryborough football player known as The King. Fisher was also an excellent sprinter—he ran the 100 yards in 10 seconds. Freeman's father Norman—born to Fisher and Fraser Islander Geraldine Roy in 1940—inherited his father's brilliance on the football field.

Cathy's mother Cecelia Sibley, born in the late '30s, came from mixed Syrian, British, Chinese and Aboriginal stock. Her mother Alice—Cathy's adored Nanna Sibley—was a direct descendent of the Kuku-Yalanji tribe from Tully. Cecelia was raised on Palm Island where her relatives had been sent in the government's misguided effort to displace Aborigines. When she left school at 15, she ran the switchboard at the island's Department of Native Affairs.

By 1961 she had met Norm Freeman and bore him their first child, Gavin. A daughter, Anne-Marie, followed in 1966; she had cerebral palsy and stayed with the family until she was seven. Cecelia, eight months' pregnant, reluctantly handed her to a special home in Rockhampton in 1973. Cathy came on February 16, 1973, followed by her brothers Norman in 1974 and Garth in 1976.

Norman Snr , diagnosed with severe diabetes, was on a downward slide by the time of his final child's birth. As the disease robbed him of his sporting career, he turned to drink. One of Freeman's early memories is watching her father slip away from his family. She came home from school to find family photographs smashed. "Mum and Dad were arguing so I hid behind a lounge chair." Cecelia told her daughter's biographer: "He always loved a drink but it wasn't a problem, it wasn't affecting our marriage. But as the sickness got worse, so did the drinking and that did affect us." She used to take the children to her mother's house when she saw a Friday night binge approaching. "His decline was terrible to watch." In 1978, he left his family to return to his people in Woorabinda. Cathy was five.

To feed her children Cecelia started cleaning the Mackay North State High School. Freeman helped her mum empty the bins and stack the chairs. Then Bruce Barber—a railway guard who had recently seen the breakdown of his marriage in Brisbane—went north to start over and ended up the Freemans' lodger. The kids hated him. "It's that white bloke here for you, Mum," Cathy would say when she opened the door to him. When the couple eventually fell in love and decided to marry, Cathy was furious.

But through it all, there was the running. The love of her life.School athletics days, constant training, after-school sports clubs had come to dominate her life. When she baulked at training one day and refused to go, her mother said: "You've got two good legs and two good arms, now use them." It was to become Cathy's mantra, repeated as she crossed the line in Sydney to win Gold at the Olympics. "It was as if God gave me Catherine and her wonderful gift to compensate for the heavy cross I had to bear with Anne-Marie," Cecelia said.

At just 11, Freeman set a new national record—1.53m—in the high jump at an athletics championships in Melbourne. That year she also claimed the state age titles in the 100m and 200m sprints and the high jump. Barber contacted the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) in Canberra to see if they'd have a look at her. The family packed up for a holiday at an ACT caravan park so Cathy could visit the AIS complex.

By 1988 battling Bruce Barber had organised $24,000 in scholarships, sending her to the exclusive Fairholme College in Toowoomba and later the sports-oriented Kooralbyn International School near Beaudesert. "What do you want to do after school?" the guidance counsellor at Mackay's Pioneer High had asked. "Win gold medals at the Olympics," Freeman said. "But what about after the Olympics?" "I don't care," she'd shrugged.

The little girl with the huge smile from Mackay could not be beaten, but through it all she was oblivious to the whispers about her Aboriginality. "Some mothers used to give me funny looks. I hadn't thought about the black thing. I thought it was just because I'd beaten their daughters," she said. Once, when Freeman was 13, she'd lain down on a bench in Melbourne's Flinders St Station, still wearing her tracksuit and exhausted after a week of competition. "Two women, ignoring the empty seats near her, called her lazy and told her to get up, they needed a seat. "What do you think you are doing?" Barber fumed. "She's my daughter."

Mike Danila had taken the Romanian athletics team to the World Student Games in Zagreb in 1987. Seeing his chance to flee his country's dictatorship, he escaped to Vienna, asked for asylum and ended up in Australia—and first encountered the remarkable teenager named Catherine Freeman. Danila considered himself lucky to be able to coach her. By November 1989, he had the 16-year-old in the trials for the Auckland Commonwealth Games.

Her parents found out she'd made the team when they read it in the newspapers. "It was like a nice dream come true," Cathy said.