Fake anthems, painted grass, iconic goals — remembering the Matildas’s first Olympics as they take on Zambia in Paris

One afternoon in mid-1999, Kate McShea, a talented young defender from Redcliffe in Queensland, arrived home from high school to find a letter on her dining room table.

It was from Chris Tanzey, the head coach of Australia’s women’s national team. He was writing to offer the teenager a scholarship to be part of the extended Matildas squad that was preparing for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

McShea was stunned. She hadn’t played for the senior team before, but already knew Tanzey from his time coaching her in the youth program. He rated her tenacity and game awareness, and felt that with a year of full-time training, she could be an important asset as Australia contested their first ever Olympics.

Letters like this were sent all over the country and all over the world. Australian striker Sunni Hughes and defender Cheryl Salisbury were playing in Japan when they received their calls home, while Alison Forman and Sharon Black were in Denmark.

One by one, they each travelled from wherever they were on the planet to settle at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra. 25 players would call its compounds and carparks home for close to twelve months as they prepared for their home Olympic Games.

“I think, at the time, I was in disbelief,” McShea said. 

“Everything came through my parents. I was only 16 at the time so I needed their consent. 

“Being so young, I was naive to what was happening. It’s not until now that I think about how torn my parents would have been at the time: so proud that I was fulfilling my dream, but their youngest daughter was moving away at just 16.”

Women’s football had only been introduced to the Olympic program four years earlier, at Atlanta 1996. But Australia had failed to qualify for it after finishing bottom of their group in the FIFA Women’s World Cup the previous year, which doubled as the Olympic qualification path back then.

This time, though, was different. As the hosts of Sydney 2000, the Matildas got an automatic spot in the tournament, which meant a wave of additional funding from the federal government to ensure the team was as prepared as possible.

Full-time football was still largely out of reach for women players in the late 1990s, and unlike the current side, less than a handful played their club football overseas. So the prospect of staying, training, and playing football at the AIS for a year was a no-brainer for majority of those called into camp.

But for those who had struck gold elsewhere, such as Hughes, the choice was a bit trickier: stay with their professional clubs, where they were on $60,000 contracts, or cut their time short to link up with the national team, where they were paid just $700 a month.

“There was little recognition of the value of playing in other country’s national leagues,” Hughes said.

“The Japanese league was really strong, but none of the coaches had been over there to see what the calibre was like, so I don’t think they really considered that it would be of benefit. The level of games we had every week really refined your abilities, and if we’d had a league back here that was that strong, that would have been fantastic. But there wasn’t.

“We were professional over there. We were full-time: playing, training, resting, recovering. All those things that come with just focusing on your sport.

“I don’t regret having to come back at all, but I just think that wouldn’t happen today.”

And so each of them flew into Canberra, with most of the team staying in the same block on the AIS campus, while a few others who already lived in the territory were able to stay elsewhere.

Squeezed together for their longest ever preparation period before a major tournament, the players naturally became very close: they ate, trained, played, and just generally hung out together whenever they got some down-time, which wasn’t often.

Hughes described it as being “on a hamster wheel”: training 40 hours a week, with two sessions on most days, and games against boys or men’s teams on Wednesdays and Saturdays. They’d play mini-World Cups each week in five-a-side formats, with games getting so hectic and competitive that some players would leave them with injuries.

When they weren’t training, some players still maintained their other jobs that they used to support themselves in their regular lives. Forman, for example, had relocated to Europe after joining Fortuna Hjørring in 1992, and would sometimes disappear into the small computer room at the AIS to keep up her work as a translator back home.

“It was really exciting, because it was the first time where we felt like full-on professional footballers,” Forman, who captained the team at Sydney 2000, said. 

“It was a fantastic time being at the AIS, preparing for something we’d never been to before.

“The friendships and the bonds that we formed within the team at that time was the most amazing part. Like I said, it was the first moment that we actually felt like we were professional with the Matildas. Even now, we still hang out and we’re still connected, and I love that.”

Preparation for the Olympics was more than just physical; it was psychological, as well. 

McShea remembers walking out before Wednesday night games to the FIFA anthem before standing in line and singing the national anthem, with the music booming out from loudspeakers that had been set up beside the field.

“Chris Tanzey didn’t want us to be over-awed by the situation, so wanted to make it as normal as possible,” she said.

“So we’d be playing against a local Canberra side, and we’d have the two anthems playing. And then, given it’s the Olympics and there’s 50,000 people and you won’t be able to hear each other, we had this crazy noise that sounded like trying to tune a radio – this crazy crackling noise – coming from the speakers to simulate the crowd.

“Then we had to stay up really late and then drive back to play a game the next day. Because we played before the opening ceremony, and then I think our next game was the day after the ceremony [which the team attended], so we had to do a simulation so we knew what it was going to be like.

“Staying up and then going and playing the next day kind of prepares you, but even after all that, nothing can really prepare you for a major tournament like that.”

Another activity that brought them closer together was the infamous nude calendar that some of the players had participated in that year to increase visibility and raise funds for their Olympic campaign.