It is likely to be rather different at the Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton on 7 August next year when the eight runners get to their marks for the women's 400m final at the first outdoor world athletics championships of the millennium. "Yes," Donna Fraser mused, "this year will be hard to beat in terms of everybody going crazy over the event. But I think a lot of people will be looking out for the women's 400m now after what happened in Sydney and the amount of attention it did get this year. I think people will be watching out to see what all of us will do."Aficionados of track and field will be watching out to see what Fraser will do in 2001 with almost as keen anticipation as they will to discover how Freeman follows her golden home run. Perhaps no athlete has taken as great a stride as Freeman did in the home straight in Stadium Australia that night - with the weight of a nation's expectation on her shoulders, pulling ahead of her rivals to deliver her symbolic unifying gold as the Aboriginal heroine of all Australia.In the wake of the clear winner, though, the fast-finishing Fraser made giant strides of her own. In 1999 the long-legged Londoner was ranked 52nd in the world, with 51.80sec. In the Olympic final she finished fourth, with a time of 49.79sec.In the track-and-field event of the year, Fraser was the sensation.
As she prepares to look ahead to 2001 and to the challenge of Edmonton, however, the Croydon Harrier cannot help reflecting on 2000 and the Sydney Olympics with a pang of disappointment. "Fourth place is always such a hard position to finish in," she said. "But if I'd been three metres behind and still finished fourth I wouldn't have minded so much. The fact that I was so close was very, very frustrating."The margin between Fraser and the bronze-medal winner - her British team-mate Katharine Merry - was a tantalising 0.07sec. Her consolation, apart from the Norwich Union Inspiration Award bestowed on her by the British Athletics Writers' Association last month, was having shown the first significant sign of fulfilling the sparkling potential she showed as winner of the European junior 400m title back in 1991. Before Sydney, her progress in the senior ranks had been continually held up by injury and illness."That's why I'm really not looking too far ahead," Fraser said.
"In the past I've looked too far ahead and something's always happened At the moment I'm just thinking about the indoor season.
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I'll be running 200m races, which will be something different I'm really looking forward to that. Obviously, my confidence is a lot higher now."Fraser's confidence was boosted before she left for Sydney by the time she spent training with Freeman at the Thames Valley Athletics Centre in the shadow of Eton College. The Australian came to London in the summer "to escape the pressure cooker of home", as she put it, and Fraser, in matching herself against the Olympic favourite and two-times world champion, found she was not as far behind the very best in the world as she had surmised. "I trained with Cathy for six weeks and a huge percentage of what I did in Sydney came from that," Fraser said.