Australia's Olympic 400 metres champion Cathy Freeman says she is retiring from athletics after losing her desire to win.

"My will to be the best athlete I can be is no longer in me," the 30-year-old told BBC radio on Tuesday. "Retirement is it, this is it."

Freeman, whose victory to the roars of a capacity crowd of 112,000 in Sydney was one of the highlights of the 2000 Games, took a year off after her win and has failed to find her best form since.

"Sydney was such an amazing mountain and to reach the pinnacle of that mountain and to have those moments was so amazing," Freeman said.

"I don't think I'll ever get to experience that again, to achieve a childhood dream that I've wanted since I was 10 in the form of an Olympic gold medal, I'm happy with that," she said.

Freeman told Australian athletics head coach Keith Connor of her decision during a meeting in London.

Connor, who had been hoping Freeman would go through with plans to run the 4x400 metre relay in next month's world championships in Paris, acknowledged that his team would have to race without her.

"It's very sad news for the team and for us in athletics...but it also puts an end to speculation as to what she was going to do," Connor told the BBC.

Speculation had been rife that Freeman might be on the verge of retirement, having announced last month that she planned to run the relay but not the individual event in Paris.

QUALIFYING TIMES

Freeman won the world title in both 1997 and 1999 but had still not posted an individual qualifying time for next month's championships when she decided not to go ahead with the individual event.

"I love running, it's all that I have known, and I hope the hunger for individual success returns in the coming months," she had said in a statement at the time.

Freeman, who as a schoolgirl used to run in bare feet along dry river beds, was only 16 when she won her first major gold medal -- in the 4x100 metres relay at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland.

She went on to become Australia's first Aboriginal track and field Olympic athlete at the 1992 Games in Barcelona and two years later took the Commonwealth 200 metre and 400 metre gold medals in Victoria.

Though her subsequent world titles established the Australian at the pinnacle of her event, the crowning glory was an emotionally charged Games in 2000 when she realised a childhood dream.

Chosen to light the Olympic flame, Freeman followed up with a pulsating victory on the track and then draped herself in the Australian and Aboriginal flags for a lap of honour, becoming a symbol of reconciliation between black and white.

Such heights could never be matched. In 2002, when her husband Alexander 'Sandy' Bodecker was diagnosed with throat cancer, Freeman managed to win a relay gold at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, her last at a major international event.