Eliza Ault-Connell spent the first staging of the women’s 1500m T54 final watching it from the side of the track. Two days later she was on the podium.
The 44-year-old Australian took bronze at Scotstoun on Friday night in a race that should never have needed staging twice, closing out one of the more unusual medal sequences of these Commonwealth Games.
The original final barely got going. A little over 100 metres in, Ault-Connell was cut off by Canada’s Nandini Sharma and went down hard, pinned against the inside rail with nowhere to go. Sharma finished second, was disqualified, and lost the silver. Ault-Connell was left in the infield with three and a half laps still to run and nothing to do but watch.
“To crash out just over 100 metres into the race, I don’t really know how to describe it,” she said. “Being left on the side of the track and watching everyone go by for a few laps gave me a bit of time to let it all sink in.
“At the end of the day, I had to assume we weren’t going to get a rerun at that point, so I just had to cheer everyone on. It was a bit shit, to be honest.”
Eliza Ault-Connell
What followed was a night of protests and appeals, and no certainty for the athletes at the centre of it.
“We really weren’t sure what was going to happen,” Ault-Connell said. “At the end of the day, we just had to go back, get some food, get some sleep and wake up to whatever the news was going to be. Whatever the outcome was going to be, I was willing to accept it and move on, because at the end of the day, we have another event.”
The re-run was granted, and not everyone was pleased about it. England’s chef de mission Jonny Riall challenged the decision and, once it stood, described the timing of it as late and deeply disappointing.
England had reason to be aggrieved. Sharma’s disqualification had promoted Ellis Kottas to silver and Australian Mikaela Dingley to bronze. The re-run wiped both results. Kottas and Dingley finished off the podium second time around, Dingley a distant sixth in her first event at a first Games.
Ault-Connell, who has been racing internationally since 2002, was not inclined to sugar-coat it.
“It’s rough, but it is racing,” she said. “It’s hard, but racing isn’t just the physicality, it’s the mental aspect too. It’s almost like ‘cruel to be kind’, but we all go through that, and those opportunities are going to help you grow as an athlete.”
Her own approach to the second attempt was blunt: get out, stay out of trouble.
“It’s not necessarily about righting the wrongs of the other day, because each opportunity is an opportunity,” she said. “I’d like to think that today I just didn’t want to hang around and risk crashing again, because I don’t think they would have had time to rerun it again. My plan was just to clear out.”
She did exactly that, going with an early three-woman breakaway and holding third behind Scotland’s Melanie Woods, who won in front of a home crowd, and Mauritius’ Noemi Alphonse.
It is Ault-Connell’s fourth Commonwealth Games medal, and it comes 24 years after the bronze she won on debut in Manchester as a teenager. She had retired, returned, retired again, and launched a second comeback only last year to get to a fourth Games, one she was not expecting to make.
“At the beginning of the year, I didn’t think I was going to be here, so it wasn’t on my 2026 bingo card.”
The week has been difficult for reasons well beyond the track. Her children and her ex-husband lost a grandmother and great-grandmother in Melbourne earlier this week, and the cost of travel meant her three children were not in Glasgow.
“It’s been a really challenging time to be away from home and not be able to support my children,” she said.
Asked whether she had been through anything like the crash before, Ault-Connell was quick.
“Fortunately, that was probably the most significant crash I’ve been involved in. So, one and done, I’d like to say.”
There was no time to dwell on any of it. Less than two hours after the re-run, Ault-Connell and compatriot Aimee Fisher were back on the track, qualifying for the women’s 400m T54 final.
