Tori West

After coming close to Olympic selection for Tokyo, in 2024 heptathlete Torri West was at a new level achieving four of her five best heptathlon scores and setting individual personal bests in all but one of the heptathlon events. Tori also recorded the highest Australian score for 16 years as she moved up to number five Australian all-time. It secured her Paris Olympic selection, and alongside Camryn Newton-Smith, they became Australia’s first Olympic heptathlon representative in 16 years. Tori had also returned to the National after a five-year break. After competing at the 2025 world championships, Tori’s 2026 campaign has another terrific one. She achieved two more-career 6000+ point tallies, up to seven now, and was second at Nationals in her third best score of her career and best on Australian soil. in June 2026 she was named on the Commonwealth Games team.

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A 3-year-old Tori West lived on the same street as her local club grass track in Warrina. Her Dad took her down one day to watch athletics and she remembers seeing someone run the 400m without a uniform, and this made her think she could do it too. She signed up soon after, but growing up would also play Basketball and Tennis. Initially she excelled in High Jump and made her first State Championship at 11. “At 15 I was scouted out by my first coach (Gary Cairns) to throw Javelin and won a national championship a year later.”

She was also a boxer and at 16, won the Queensland State title in the 69kg division.

“After High School I was a bit lost and didn’t really know what I wanted in life. By 21, I decided I wanted to pursue the heptathlon and endeavoured to qualify for the 2018 Commonwealth Games.”

She had what she described as a ‘breakout year’ in the heptathlon but just fell short of the Commonwealth Games team.

More confident in her sporting ability, Tori moved from Townsville to Brisbane to train under coach Eric Brown and won the 2020 National title and became the sixth Aussie to score over 6000 points. Set to qualify for the Tokyo Olympic in Europe, COVID hit the world. Tori was one athlete significantly impacted by the pandemic. Locked out of Queensland for nine months, she also struggled with injuries and major season interruptions. She admits “I was extremely close to walking away from the sport.” But there was a positive. “During this time is when I built my life and career outside of sport.” – making a career as a Software Engineer/Blockchain Developer.

Her athletics career was also gathering momentum, ahead of her landmark 2024 campaign which included three scores over 6000 points including two over 6200. Her high scores were in two major international combined event meets – Gotzis and Ratingen. However, her pathway to the Olympics was not straight forward as she had to endure three heptathlons over five weeks, two in Europe and one in Fiji. Across her individual events she set personal best in all events except the javelin. She would eventually score sufficient World Athletics ranking points to claim the last (24th) place for the Paris Olympics.

At the Games she started perfectly, clocking a PB of 13.62 in the first event the 100m hurdles. Her start to day two, the long jump, was not ideal, leaping a below par distance of 5.41w. She continued on to score 5848 points and place 20th.

In 2025 Tori won her second Australian title with a solid score of 6107 points. Her competition included a PB of 13.59 in the 100m hurdles. Unfortunately, in two major European heptathlons in Gotzis and Talence, Tori was unable to finish, however she did accumulate sufficient World Athletics points to be selected in the top-24 in the world to compete at the world championships. In Tokyo she scored 5778 points in the heptathlon to placed 17th.

A great start to 2026 for Tori with her third highest career tally of 6162 points to claim silver at Nationals. In May she scored 6096 points at Gotzis, her seventh career 6000-point score. During the year she has also been making progress in the 100m hurdles, clocking her two fastest times of her career.

@ 5 July 2026 david.tarbotton@athletics.org.au