Eliza Ault-Connell

The athletics journey for Eliza Ault-Connell has certainly been unique since making her debut as a 21-year-old at the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games. Family and different motivations have seen her take breaks from the national team membership which now stretches 25 years with her selection for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2026.

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Eliza Ault-Connell had a great passion for sport, involved with horse riding, netball and basketball in her teens. A week after she turned 16, in 1997, she woke with a sore throat, but during the day her health deteriorated as meningococcal bacteria attacked her body. “I went from being fine that morning to being on life support that night,” Ault-Connell said. “I fell into a coma that night and I had my legs amputated on the second night of the coma.” Eliza remained in hospital for six months. In 1998 she received prosthetic legs to compete in athletics and competed in the T44 class (double below-knee amputees). But it was challenging for the teenager. “I had to stop running because I had a problem in the bone in the stump,” she says. “I’d do a hard training session, it would swell up and I wouldn’t be able to walk. So, I switched to wheelchair racing.”

She burst onto the international scene in 2002, winning a bronze medal in the women’s 800m (1:54.20) at the Commonwealth Games, before upgrading to silver at that year’s World Championships, in the women’s 400m T54 (1:01.50).

She made her Paralympic debut in Athens in 2004, competing in five events from 200 to 5000 metres. She successful progressed to the final in all five events, a massive program of 10 races. In the T54 1500m she just missed the podium by 0.04 seconds, placing fourth behind bronze medallist Canadian Diane Roy in a time of 3:28.66. Prior to the Paralympics she competed in a demonstration event, the T54 800m wheelchair at the Olympics, where she won silver, just pipping team mate Louise Sauvage.

On home soil and competing at her second Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006, Eliza won silver in the T54 800m, ahead of a terrific World Para-Athletics Championships later in 2006, where she won bronze in the 800m and just missed the podium with fourth places in the 200m and 400m.

In 2008 she and former teammate Kieran Ault-Connell started a family. Three children later and a decade on, she was inspired to resume her athletics career when her daughter commented “You used to be so cool when you did wheelchair racing”.

It was as if she never left. Eliza won a silver medal in the women’s marathon T54 (1:44:13) at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. At the 2019 World Para-Athletics Championships in Dubai, she was terrific, competing in eight races and every track event from 100m to 5000m. She won bronze in the women’s 400m T54 (55.30) was top-6 in four of the events.

She successfully trained and compete through the COVID effected years of 2020 and 2021 with the goal of returning to the Paralympic arena, 17 years after her debut in Athens in 2004.

At the Paralympics in Tokyo Eliza was 7th in the T54 400m, 8th in the 100m and 13th in the marathon.

Competing domestically for the last few years, at this year’s Australian Championships she won the women’s wheelchair 100m and 400m and in May 2026 was announced on her fourth Commonwealth Games team where she will compete in the T54 400m and 1500m in Glasgow.

@14 June 26 david.tarbotton@athletics.org.au