There’s a crypto founder competing for Australia at the Paris Olympics

Tori West is competing in her first Olympics in the heptathlon. But she’s also got several years as a tech founder on her resume.

Olympic heptathlete Tori West owns her own blockchain company.

Meet the 28-year-old blockchain start-up owner who is about to compete for Australia in athletics at the Paris Olympics.

Tori West will make her Olympic debut on Thursday evening Australian time in the heptathlon, putting aside her emerging athlete data company to concentrate on her sport – but not for too long.

There is a dearth of female technology founders, let alone one who also finds the time to compete at an elite level in a sport requiring expertise in seven disciplines – 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m sprint, long jump, javelin and 800m run.

West is the founder and owner of Equil Labs, a business that designs and produces apps targeted at helping athletes, including allowing athletes to own their performance data as Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the XRP Ledger, an open source blockchain.

Her company’s latest project, an app called EQLX, aims to help athletes, fans and leagues own performance data by using blockchain technology.

“I believe that every athlete should own a piece of the data they produce, and we can extract the value of sports data into something tangible and exchangeable through the blockchain,” West told The Australian in Paris while training ahead of her event.

“Gambling uses sports data for gambling profits; we want to use sports data for using data for profit in a different way.

“Imagine an athlete, having all their (sports) data stored since the age of four and saved in my own digital wallet and having that beautiful and unique data to show (in the blockchain), and they can also profit if other people want to use it.”

Tori West launches herself, competing in long jump. Picture: Evan Morgan

West has a staff of five at her business, which has been in accelerator programs. She speaks at crypto and blockchain conferences and has a sponsorship deal with crypto exchange BTC ­Markets.

“People identify me as a bit of an anomaly in the space, with a different perspective on blockchain and sports tech, trying to build that bridge between the two worlds,” West says. Meanwhile, she is in the best form of her athletic career, having made a large surge to qualify for the Games with a stellar performance at a major competition in Germany in June.

What has helped, she says, is having to balance her sporting pursuits with running a burgeoning tech play. And it all goes back to when she could not compete during Covid lockdowns just a few years ago.

“The truth is my company took off via Covid. I had won the national championships in 2020, had a breakout year and thought I was on top of the world and going to Tokyo (the 2020 Olympics that ended up delayed by a year), but ended up locked out of my home state (Queensland) for months,” West explains.

“The crypto markets had a bull run, I’m in the tech world and had some crypto, so I did all right. But I also thought this was a technology that was going to change the world, and I’ve got all this energy and ambition, so I may as well put that in my business.”

In truth, West has been a budding entrepreneur for some time, having dabbled in graphic design after high school, which led to web development work, phone apps, teaching herself how to code during Covid lockdowns and now blockchain.

“I learned on the job and did a lot of work for free. I built a portfolio and learned it’s very valuable to be a good communicator in this space,” West says.

All the while, she was building up her athletic career as well. West, who is from Townsville, says she “slipped through the cracks” of the athletics talent development system.

She was spotted in high school by her first coach Gary Cairns and won a national javelin title at 16, but she was a quiet kid with no grand ambitions in sport. It was only in 2017 when she was convinced to try the heptathlon.

West missed selection for Tokyo, and the 2018 and 2022 Commonwealth Games.

She says being in business has helped keep her Olympic dream alive. “I have had to be an entrepreneur to make my athletic ambitions come to fruition. There’s a huge public perception that athletes good enough to compete in the Olympics are paid well,” she says. “But I’m not in any funding programs, I have had to pay my own way when competing, and I’m lucky that my company has done well enough to be able to do that.

“Athletics is a priority; my health and wellness have to be good. But the other thing I have figured out is I can’t be completely consumed by athletics. The athletic bubble of hype is not reality; I still have bills to pay and the responsibility of having my company acts as a reality check. I still have to run the business and I have people working for me.”