To mark 100 days from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Nine.com.au asked you what your favourite Olympic memories were in a survey. The response was overwhelming! We chose 50 of them to re-live, one a day, before new memories are made in Paris. Scroll on for today's memory.
The win was titanic and the celebration priceless.
An Australian swimming relay team featuring Michael Klim, Chris Fydler, Ashley Callus and Ian Thorpe had just inflicted the first men's 4x100m freestyle defeat on the US in Olympic history.
Then the air guitars came out.
Watch the video at the top of the page to watch Australia's epic "guitar-smashing" win at the Sydney 2000 Olympics!
Going wild on the pooldeck on the opening night of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the four relay heroes fired a shot back at Gary Hall junior, the brash anchor of the US team who'd sledged the Australians ahead of the Games, declaring the Americans would "smash them like guitars".
Klim got the Australian team off to a blinding start by ripping through his leg in world record time.
Next was Fydler, then Callus.
When Thorpe launched into the pool, the Australians held a slight lead over the second-placed Americans, and although the 17-year-old superstar trailed Hall by half a body length when he turned for home, he would close the gap and steal the lead back in the final 10 metres.
Thorpe and his teammates also set a new world record, stopping the clock at three minutes and 13.67 seconds (3:13.67).
As Klim, Fydler and Callus flung their arms in the air on the pooldeck, Thorpe clenched a fist in the pool and punched the air.
The staggering win and epic guitar smashing proved the perfect reply to Hall's spicy call.
"Everyone's claiming it was their idea, so I'm going to keep doing it and say it was my idea," Klim said with a laugh in a recent interview with Wide World of Sports.
"I'm glad that it happened. If you say 'air guitar relay' everyone knows what you're talking about."
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