MCG turns pink for a cause

An attendance of 39,475 for a Melbourne v Adelaide AFL match on May 6, 2005 - when 25,000 would have been the norm for a match involving those two teams - confirmed that once again we had witnessed a very special event at the home of Australian sport.

The event – Field of Women at the ‘G - was the culmination of a highly successful breast cancer awareness campaign coordinated by Breast Cancer Network Australia.

In poignant and emotional scenes, more than 11,500 women and 100 men clad in pink and blue ponchos respectively – many of them breast cancer survivors - gathered on the arena before the game, filling the outline of a female figure stretching almost from one end of the ground to the other.

Known thereafter as the Pink Lady, the number of participants that night represented the number of people in Australia diagnosed with the disease each year. Subsequent events in 2010 and 2014 have reinforced the MCG’s connection to community and the importance of the continued fight to prevent and cure breast cancer.