After years of trying to dodge the fame Olympic success brought her, an Aboriginal athlete who carried the torch that opened the Sydney Games in 2000 and won the 400-meter gold to fulfill her nation's expectations, decided to use her celebrity to help educate the Aboriginal children from northeastern Australia, where her mother was born.

As the name and face of the Catherine Freeman Foundation, a charity devoted to helping to educate Aboriginal children from Palm Island in northeastern Australia, she has no problem conveying the challenge she now confronts. "It is a national disgrace," she said.

(READ her story in the New York Times)