‘I always knew I had it in me’: Meet Torrie Lewis aka Australia’s fastest woman – who is bound for the Paris Olympics
She spirited into sporting history with a record-breaking run that saw her dubbed Australia’s ‘fastest woman ever’. Now, Torrie Lewis reveals what’s next as she prepares for the Paris Olympics.
Stellar
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Running 100 metres takes Torrie Lewis less than 12 seconds. Blink, and you might miss her whoosh by. But for Lewis, Australia’s fastest woman ever, that tiny fragment of time offers up the world.
“I feel like my brain is always working in overdrive. I’m always thinking about something.
“When I run, my mind just goes completely blank and it just focuses on one thing, which is a really nice change. Everything just kind of goes quiet,” the 19-year-old tells Stellar.
“I remember horse riding when I was little – and this probably sounds cringe – but feeling the air on your skin and through your hair … it’s the ultimate feeling of freedom.
“And I feel like that when I run. That’s probably my favourite feeling in the world. That’s why I love to run.”
In January, Lewis broke a record that had stood for a decade when – in just 11.10 seconds – she went from starter’s gun to finish line in a 100m race in Canberra.
It took a mere .01 second for Melissa Breen’s 2014 record to fall; Lewis also smashed Raelene Boyle’s under-20 national record of 11.20, which had stood since the Mexico City Olympics in 1968.
“My long-term goal was to maybe get a national record for my country,” Lewis reflects now. “I had definitely not planned to reach that goal until much later in my career. To be able to do that so early, I like to see it as a good thing. Maybe I can do even more than I have planned.”
What makes her achievement even more astonishing is that Lewis only took up track and field as her chosen sport eight years ago.
She tells Stellar that while she was a naturally fast child – Lewis jokes that her father, who is of Jamaican-Indian descent, “says he is fast” – gymnastics was her initial love.
When she made the switch, Lewis was enmeshed in intense training sessions that were leaving her feeling lethargic; only later did she learn that she was grappling with undiagnosed coeliac disease.
“I was training like 20 hours a week at nine and 10 years old,” she explains.
“And I was just getting really sore. I didn’t have the motivation to get out there and do it anymore. So I quit. Then when we found out I was coeliac, I didn’t really want to go back to gymnastics, because it would have been a lot of work just to get back to where I was.
“So I just kind of went into Little Athletics because my friends were there – and I knew I was fast.”
Her natural ability saw then 11-year-old Lewis win the State Championships and make it to finals, but it wasn’t until she started working with coach Gerrard Keating soon afterwards that a career in the sport became a reality.
At the start of 2020 Lewis moved to Brisbane from Newcastle, but Keating ended up stuck in New South Wales because of state border closures. Which meant if the then 15-year-old wanted to train, she would have to do it herself.
Unsurprisingly, Lewis recalls, “It was a lot of effort. I had to get the bus from school [to the track], bring all my stuff with me, set it out by myself … and there was no-one to keep me accountable, except me.
“That’s when I really had to be like, ‘Do I want to keep going with this sport and put in all this effort? Or do I just want to stop?’”
Ultimately, she says, “I decided that I really do want this.”
That vital mix of determination and discipline is something Lewis credits her mother with instilling in her. As she explains, Wendy – who raised Lewis as a single mum – supported herself through university, and when her daughter was six years old, moved the two of them to Australia from the UK.
Despite knowing nobody – and, in fact, never having been to this country before – there was a key reason driving their relocation: Wendy wanted to raise her daughter somewhere warm.
“She’s probably the most independent and hardworking person I know,” Lewis tells Stellar of her mother.
“If I have a hard situation, I think, ‘What would Mum do?’ I definitely got that self-confidence, that you can handle whatever life comes at you with, from her.”
The athlete’s swift rise through the ranks comes at an opportune time, given it coincides with the renaissance of track and field in the national consciousness.
At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Australia’s fastest man Rohan Browning just missed becoming the first Australian into the final of the men’s 100m in 65 years.
At the same Games, Peter Bol became the fastest Australian 800m athlete in history, but narrowly missed the chance to win a history-making medal in the race. Lewis’ situation looks different: her age and speed mean she can participate in both junior competitions and with the national senior relay team.
“Australia in track hasn’t necessarily been as strong as it is in swimming, so I definitely looked outside Australia for my heroes growing up,” she says. That has now changed.
“It’s not even just running; it’s the whole track and field team. We’re getting gold medals in jumps and long distances. It’s exciting to be part of.”
Her success also dovetails with increasing awareness of (and interest in) the powerful gains that are being made by female athletes across a wide range of sporting codes and competitions, both at home and around the world.
It’s a pivotal and long-awaited shift, and one that is at the heart of Stellar’s Women In Sport issue, which features Lewis as its cover star.
As she points out, “Being a woman in sport, it’s the perfect time. We’re excelling in almost every avenue, and this is the most exposure we’ve ever had. I’m really happy that this is the time I’m coming up in.”
It’s also a time that has given Lewis an opportunity to more freely express herself. After her record-breaking run, she decided to start wearing her curly hair in braids.
“Growing up I really wanted straight hair,” she says.
“Within the past couple of years, I’ve embraced wearing it out. And this year I started doing braids. I had always seen them and thought they were super cool – but I wasn’t brave enough to do it.”
Given that she competes in a sport where victory is determined in fractions of a second rather than minutes, Lewis notes that “people always ask me if it slows me down. But the Americans and Jamaicans always run with big weaves and bigger braids than me, and they seem to do pretty fine. I will say, it definitely feels lighter when I run with my natural hair.”
Lewis wasn’t yet born when Australia stopped in its tracks to watch Cathy Freeman take out gold in the 400m at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, but she hopes to be able to give the nation something to cheer for again at this year’s Paris Olympics, having secured a berth in May alongside her relay teammates Ebony Lane, Bree Masters and Ella Connolly.
Now Lewis is set to anchor a race for an event that hasn’t had Australian representation since the Games at which Freeman made history.
“The support I’ve had this year after breaking my record has been incredible. I do think Australia just kind of wants somebody to get behind. And they love the sprint,” says Lewis, who has put her university studies in computer engineering on the backburner to focus on her running career. Just weeks after she competes at her first Olympics (it is not yet confirmed whether Lewis will run an individual race in Paris), she will head to Peru to compete in the World Athletics Under-20 Championships.
“It’s a big year for me,” she tells Stellar. “My plan was to make it to the Olympics. I always knew I had it in me. But to think you can do it, and then to actually do it, is a very different thing. And selection is a lot harder than I had originally thought, so I’m really proud of myself.”
Still, being in the spotlight – to say nothing of being dubbed the country’s fastest woman of all time – brings with it some pretty lofty expectations.
Asked how she is feeling about the pressure, Lewis replies: “That’s definitely one of the things I’ve had to adjust to most this year. Because what happens if I get beaten? Am I still Australia’s fastest woman? At the end of the day, I think the highest expectations come from me. I have really high standards for myself. So if I take those off, the expectations from other people don’t necessarily bother me.
“As an elite athlete, you do want eyeballs on you and exposure, and I’ve been really privileged that people have wanted to shoot me or interview me because that’s something that we really need in the sport.
“But I’ve definitely had to try to balance that with my training and remember, you know, the only reason I have any of these people wanting to talk to me is because I run fast.
“So I do have to remain humble in that way and make training a priority so that I can keep on running fast. And I think I’m doing pretty well with it all.”
Read the full interview and see the cover shoot with Torrie Lewis in Stellar. For more from Stellar, click here.
Originally published as ‘I always knew I had it in me’: Meet Torrie Lewis aka Australia’s fastest woman – who is bound for the Paris Olympics
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