3 minute read
The 20th anniversary of Australia's Hollywood-style Olympic beach volleyball win still stirs up magical memories for Natalie Cook and Kerri Pottharst.
As candidates for a movie out of a Sydney Olympics gold medal win, Kerri Pottharst and Natalie Cook are right up there for their magical beach volleyball triumph.
In fact, Hollywood director Joseph McGinty Nichol was so inspired watching on at Bondi Beach in 2000 that he named the lead in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, played by Cameron Diaz, Natalie Cook.
True story.
"And the dog is called 'Spike' and there are a lot of volleyball connotations because he was so impressed," Cook told AAP while recalling the two most unforgettable weeks of her life.
"It's like a fairytale."
Twenty years on, striking gold on the golden sand of Australia's most iconic beach still feels like fate for Cook and Pottharst.
The whole surreal experience began with the pair told they wouldn't be staying in the athletes' village - because Homebush was too far away from Bondi - but instead at a nunnery at Randwick.
Having soaked up the village experience en route to the bronze medal in Atlanta four years earlier, it was a shock to their system.
But they soon settled in alongside the sisters, while making sure to also take regular field trips to Homebush to savour the patriotic fervour inside the village.
Cook and Pottharst were also advised against attending the opening ceremony because they were playing the following day.
That they wouldn't cop.
"We had marched in Atlanta and realised how powerful it was," Cook said.
"We knew it would lift us and inspire us so much to be in the home country of an Olympics marching that we fought really hard to march against everyone's recommendations."
Marching and staying nearby their competition venue both proved masterstrokes as Cook and Pottharst charged to the gold-medal match with four stirring victories.
But they weren't supposed to beat Brazilians Shelda Bede and Adriana Behar in the final.
"We were playing the best in the world. On paper, if you'd have been a betting person, you would have put all your money on them. Absolutely," Cook said.
"We'd played them 17 times and only beaten them once. I remember crapping myself ready to go out."
Feeling "like a rock star", though, after emerging from the tunnel onto the beach before 10,000 wild fans, it all came together for Cook and Pottharst as they miraculously reeled in big deficits in both sets to reign 12-11 12-10 in one of the great Olympic upsets.
"Plays that we had worked on behind closed doors and never used we pulled out in an Olympic gold-medal match and they worked perfectly," Cook said.
"Every time the ball sat on top of the net, it fell our way and the Brazilians kept getting more and more deflated.
"And if you circle that back, the nuns take full credit for that, right?"
