‘She was just something out of the box’: Torrie Lewis’ coach on moment he knew she was a star
Torrie Lewis, our fastest ever woman over 100m, is only 19 but she’s off to Paris to race in the relay and the 200m. Her coach reveals the moment he knew she was a track and field superstar.
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For some the Covid pandemic was a killer, a disease which also broke people mentally and sent businesses to the wall.
But for rising teenage track and field superstar Torrie Lewis, it spawned a wave of energy which will see her blaze across the world stage at this year’s Paris Olympic Games.
You see, the hardships of 2020, when Queensland was cut off from the rest of the world, proved to be the making of Lewis, Australia’s fastest ever woman over 100m who will represent the green and gold in Paris as a 4x100m relay runner and in the 200m.
Picture this. Lewis, aged 15 at the time, had just moved with her mother, Wendy, from Newcastle to Brisbane’s western suburbs when the then-premier Annastacia Palaszczuk closed the border.
The plan had been for Lewis to start at her new school, St Peters Lutheran College, and for her then-coach, Gerrard Keating, to follow her up from Newcastle.
Instead Lewis was left alone. The pandemic had closed the school, Keating was marooned in New South Wales, and her mother Wendy was starting a new job as a clinical scientist.
Such isolation was hardly an ideal environment for a teenager to continue to develop her 100m and 200m track and field career. It was sink or swim stuff. But she swam, finding her way with her dog to a local park, or Toowong Harriers Little Athletic grounds to train.
“I didn’t have Gerrard (ex-coach) there for the sessions, or Mum to take me,’’ Lewis says.
“I had to get the bus and set everything up on my own and some days I really didn’t want to do it. I remember sitting on the grass thinking, ‘Why do I want to do this?’ And that (Covid era) was a make or break moment for me. It brought out the best in me.”
Mum Wendy adds: “That (Covid era) was when she realised she could really do something quite special.
“It all fell on her. She did everything herself. It was all her motivation. She did it all on her own. For a 15-year-old girl to do that is massive.”
Her dog, English staffy Marley and her mum – that was all Lewis needed at the time.
And aside from a bank of knowledge built up courtesy of her past coach, Keating, and her current coach Andrew Iselin– both Marley and Mum are all she still needs.
Don’t underestimate the role her dog Marley has played in Lewis’s life.
According to Wendy, Lewis “loves that dog more than life itself”. Lewis says Marley was her first training partner.
“I had her before I started training properly and looking back on my memories on my phone the other day, there were videos of us at a local dog park running laps,” Lewis says.
“We still like to go for a walk together in the bush, which is what I like to do these days to get away from everything.”
Keating adds: “Torrie is happy doing what she is doing, but her mum and her dog are her world and that is what she misses most when she is overseas. She used to say to me: ‘I can't wait to get home and see Marley and Mum – and it was normally in that order. Marley first, Mum second,” Keating laughs.
Lewis, Wendy and Marley. It’s the three musketeers. But there is a fourth now – her training partner Calab Law.
Like Lewis, Law, 20, is also a sprinter, coached by Iselin, and has also qualified for his first Olympic Games.
“We became friends on a junior relay camp in 2020 and we have been best friends ever since,” Lewis says. “And not just track friends, but best friends outside of track.”
Coach Iselin has enjoyed seeing their friendship blossom, a relationship which breaks up the intensity of training, relaxes them. But there is a flip side.
Law brings out the daredevil in Lewis.
“If you speak to her friends, Torrie is the sensible one,” Wendy says.
“She is logical, level headed and doesn’t get involved in drama.
“She is a very good friend and very honest with her friends. But her and Calab Law together, well, when they get together you close your eyes and hope for the best, really.
“Calab is a bit more on the wild side than her, and while it is good for her to let loose a bit … She has no fear. She just doesn’t see it at all.”
The pair will rope swing into a creek, walk to the edge of cliffs, sometimes just be a bit daring. Last month Lewis and Law rode horses along a Fijian beach – despite Law having never ridden and Lewis having not ridden for five years.
“Maybe that is an example of something we might not tell Andrew about. Or we’d tame it down for him,” Lewis smiles.
If you look into her eyes you can see Lewis is just bursting with life.
“I liken her to when I look into my border collie’s eyes, and he wants to play. She gets a bit like that,’’ Iselin says.
Wendy adds: “As a little one she never sat still. She runs around with that smile on her face and that has always been her. She is just like that.”
Lewis likes life in the fast lane as well – sometimes literally. “She needs to take her foot off the pedal in her car a bit,” Wendy says in reference to Lewis’s driving of a Holden Tigra. “Everything is fast. Everything she does is fast.”
Fast. A need for speed. That’s a good trait for a young woman to have entered her first Olympic Games, isn’t it?
And it has always been that way.
Lewis is UK-born, and as a child aged five or six, when she was living in Scotland’s Dundee, she was the fastest girl in the school during lunchtime sprints.
“It was always between me and this other boy as to who was fastest in the school. I think I’d win,” Lewis says.
She has a family bloodline back to athletics. Both her mum and her father – who remained in the UK – were handy runners in their youth. But they were never as quick as their daughter. Lewis would win races at school wearing jogging shoes, often getting through only on her gymnastics fitness.
“It was then, when she was young that I thought, ‘Oh, she might be all right at this’,” Wendy says.
Keating, himself a former Australian Commonwealth Games 100m finalist, says the first time he laid eyes on Lewis as a 10 year old from Macquarie Hunter Athletics Club, he saw something special.
“Normally I would not look at a 10 year old and say she is the next big thing,” he says.
“But she was just something out of the box.”
Wendy was also the perfect influence on her down-to-earth daughter.
“We never chased records. And she never has done,” Wendy says. “Any record she has got has been a surprise. And we were very lucky because Gerrard coached her properly.”
Lewis was also lucky to have a mother who was so supportive.
“But I don’t think I have made a sacrifice for her at all,” Wendy says. “I was always a huge athletics fan so it was no hardship to me.
“Yes, financially, that is what we spent our money on, but that was because that is what she wanted to do.”
Lewis adds: “Mum always had the belief from day one that I could go all the way. It is because of her love of sport that I started getting into it, and I just love it. (My success) makes her happy as well.”
Aside from supporting each other, cooking for each other is also what mother and daughter like to do. Although Lewis is a coeliac and has to avoid food with gluten in it, she will cook her mother rice and Asian meals.
“She is a great cook herself and cooks a lot,” Wendy says.
Lewis will also cook her mother pancakes.
“She makes a mean breakfast of pancakes. I like banana, caramel, strawberries and chocolate sauce.”
In return Wendy will put together a meat and three veg roast featuring beef or ham with all the trimmings, including Yorkshire pudding. It seems you can take the Lewis girls away from Great Britain, but you can’t take Great Britain out of their diet.
The pair also has a hunger to enjoy the Olympics together – Lewis as an athlete and mum as a spectator. Wendy always dreamt of attending an Olympic Games with her daughter and had intended to attend the London Games (2012), but she received a job offer in Australia which saw the pair leave Scotland.
“It will be emotional to attend Paris because I have never been to an Olympics,” she says.
“The first one I can remember watching was ’84 (Los Angeles). And I have watched them every time since. We moved to Australia the year before London, otherwise we would have gone to the London Olympics.
“So for me to go to my first Olympics and watch her there, it will be just really, really special.”
And wouldn’t it be special if Lewis and her 4x100m relay team reached the final – and even snared a medal. “We are all making each other faster,” Lewis says in reference to her relay teammates Ebony Lane, Bree Masters and Ella Connolly. “We all know we can make the final and medal.”
While Lewis is the Australian record holder over 100m with a time of 11.10, she will run the 4x100m relay and the 200m individual race in Paris.
Lewis chose the 200m event after Athletics Australia asked her, and fellow relay teammates, to restrict their individual races to just one so they were fresh for Australia’s tilt at a potential 4x100m Games’ relay medal.
Her self belief was also fortified by beating 100m world champion Sha’Carri Richardson in April in the 200m at the Diamond League meeting in China.
“Racing against the best in the world and hanging with them was the biggest test and confidence booster I could get,” Lewis says. “Just competing was a career bucket list, and that I won one that had been on my list of achievements for a number of years.
“As for the Olympics – as long as I stay uninjured, I think I will do well.”
All this from a girl whose first memory of Australia was walking along George St, Sydney, and through the Paddington Markets where her mum bought one of those hats with the corks.
“Then we walked to see Circular Quay and I have a photo of me with that corked hat on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.”
A dinky-di Aussie from the moment she landed on Australian soil with mum Wendy.
Who’d have known then she would become the fastest female sprinter in Australian history and a Paris Olympian, with aspirations for a second Games in Los Angeles (2028) and a third in Brisbane, of all places (2032).
“That is the ultimate goal,” she says.
“It is possible. It would be great if it all panned out. A hometown Olympics, that is all anybody hopes for.”
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