Why won’t Australia’s fastest woman compete in the Olympics’ fastest race?
Torrie Lewis, Australia’s fastest woman, has declared that she will not run in the Olympics’ quickest race.
And male sprinting sensation Rohan Browning faces a stressful few days waiting to find out if he can still make the team.
Browning has dropped to 57th position in the rankings, one spot behind the 56 athletes eligible to compete at the Games. The world rankings ended on June 30, and when they were revised, Browning had dropped a few spots from just days before and was now outside the top 56.
Bree Masters of Australia is also 57th in the women’s 100m, and like Browning, she hopes that athletes in the 56th place withdraw due to injury or that countries do not take up the available spot, which is not uncommon.
Lewis, 19, will only compete in the 200m and 4x100m relays, not the individual 100m sprint. She broke the national 100m mark in January of this year with a time of 11.1 seconds.
Lewis had been training for the 200m since breaking the 100m record, and in April she defeated world 100m champion Sha’Carri Richardson in a Diamond League 200m race.
She had hoped to run the sprint double as well as the relay, but had to abandon those plans. Athletics Australia wanted her to focus on one particular event, therefore she chose the 200m, which has resulted in her world 100m ranking falling outside the range for qualification.
“I had to pick between the one and the two, so I’m going to pick the two,” she told me. “My 100 when I get going I’m fine, but my start isn’t at the level it needs to be for me to be fully confident in it just yet.”
Athletics Australia’s high-performance director, Andrew Faichney, felt it was the appropriate decision, with the Australian women a strong contender in the relay and Lewis racing at the World Juniors so soon after the Olympics.
“She has not ran many 100s [since the record], hence she is ineligible for the 100. “The decision with her coach was to focus on one, and it was always the 200m,” he explained.
Rohan Browning, Australia’s best-performing international sprinter, will join the relay squad for Paris.Credit: GETTY IMAGES.
The American Athletic Association will announce its final Olympic team on Monday. All countries must nominate their teams to governing Athletics by Friday, and the governing body will confirm berths by Sunday.
Faichney believes Browning and Masters will still be chosen since many athletes withdraw due to injuries or because their country refuses to take a qualification position.
In Tokyo, Browning ran 10.01 seconds in his heat to get to the semi-finals. Last year, in the global championships in Budapest, he ran 10.11 seconds in his heat to get to the semi-finals, but he missed the final after running the same time.
He has been dealing with a persistent knee issue that has limited his training this year, but he has been on a solid training block in Europe for the past month after competing in the Oceania championships in Fiji in June.
Browning finished third in Fiji, after Australian relay teammates Josh Azzopardi and 18-year-old Seb Sultana.
Ella Connolly has already qualified for the women’s 100 metres and will be included in the team.
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