To mark 100 days from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Video games, 9.com.au requested you what your favorite Olympic recollections had been in a survey. The response was overwhelming! We selected 50 of them to re-live, one a day, earlier than new recollections are made in Paris. Scroll on for at present’s reminiscence.
Three Australian ladies received particular person Olympic gold on the Sydney 2000 Video games: Cathy Freeman, Susie O’Neill and Lauren Burns.
The latter did so in taekwondo — shuffling, pivoting, roundhouse-kicking and screaming her method to victory in a gold medal match in opposition to Cuban fighter Urbia Melendez Rodriguez.
Burns, the daughter of Nineteen Seventies singer Ronnie Burns, grew up watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film collection together with her brother.
Watch the video on the high of the web page to see the second Lauren Burns received taekwondo gold on the Sydney 2000 Olympics!
And after successful 12 nationwide titles, she received the chance to unleash her Ninja Turtle strikes on the Sydney Video games, the place taekwondo, a Korean fight sport, made its Olympic debut.
Burns, a fearless competitor from Melbourne, defeated her Cuban rival 4-2 within the ladies’s 49kg competitors, creating historical past in entrance of a vigorous crowd on the State Sports activities Centre.
“The primary thought that came visiting me was, ‘Yep, I did it’, as a result of I used to be so targeted on that course of,” Burns stated, as quoted on the Australian Olympic Committee’s web site.
Lauren Burns en path to successful gold on the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Getty Pictures
“I simply knew I used to be going to win as a result of I had put in my coronary heart, soul and each little bit of my being, each ounce of my focus, and it had all come collectively. Being within the second, reacting within the second and simply trusting that I used to be going to make the correct selections was so highly effective, nevertheless it was all concerning the course of and taking part in the sport.
“I spoke to my sports activities psychologist and he stated to me, ‘You’re simply doing an odd factor on a rare day’, in order that was the mindset I went in with, and it wasn’t till the referee gave the choice and I went over to my coach that it began to sink in.
Lauren Burns pictured together with her gold medal in Sydney. Getty Pictures
“Somebody handed me the Australian flag, and I discovered my household and buddies then I ran across the stadium, being swept up within the second.”
She stays the one Australian to have received Olympic gold in taekwondo.
“They might have needed to chop off my legs to cease me,” Burns advised The Sydney Morning Herald 10 years after the win.
After standing on the highest step of the rostrum and having her gold medal draped round her neck, she retired as a legend of the game.
