Grit, determination, grace: meet Australian sprint superstar, Ebony Lane

Ebony's story

Australia is a sporting nation. The ultimate dream for many Aussie kids is to wear the green and gold when they grow up. Cricket and footy players make big money entertaining us, and doing what they love. But for the majority of athletes, competing at the highest level means making big financial sacrifices. The Aussie Athlete Fund wants to change that.

Launched in 2024, it's One Million Challenge pairs athletes with corporate organisations who can use their size and profile to raise funds, and let sportspeople concentrate on what they do best. RPS is lucky enough to have been paired with 25-year-old sprint star, Ebony Lane.

Ebony is an effervescent sort of person. Even speaking to her interstate via a video meeting, you can feel the aura of positive energy that bubbles all around her. Back in Australia a few weeks post a four-month stint in Europe­ - and an Olympics campaign that didn’t go according to plan - it would be easy for her energy to be different. Lower, perhaps. But that’s not her way.

We started by discussing her journey into sprinting. Like many track and field stars, it started at ‘Little As’.  

“My journey in athletics started when I was four. Mum and Dad took us down to Collingwood Little Athletics Club in Victoria. They actually grew up doing mainly beach sprinting – especially my Mum. I think she would have loved for us kids to do surf lifesaving, but we were living in the city (Melbourne) at the time, and we weren't close to any beaches. So that's when they decided to put us into Little Athletics.”

It might have been the starting point, but it wasn’t the only sporting pathway that Ebony travelled down, taking up tennis, netball, dancing, cricket, and AFL. “Pretty much any sport that I could get into, I was doing it”.

The turning point that saw her commit to sprinting full time came via a severe injury.

“In 2016, I was looking to make it in the AFL. I was striving towards that, but tore my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). We had a meeting with the surgeon, and he was pretty much: ‘look, you can either get the surgery, fix your ACL and continue on with these other sports. Or you can not get the surgery, but you're going to be limited to straight line running”.

When she says limited to straight line, she means it. To this day, Ebony doesn’t compete in anything longer than 100 metres.

“The two hundred metres involves running around a bend, so I was literally limited to doing straight line running. Even my gym work was all changed around due to not having an ACL. I did go to a few other surgeons a couple of years later to get their opinions and they all said ‘you need to get the surgery. You need to get it fixed’.

“I feel like it was definitely a sign that the first surgeon we went to said, ‘no, stick to the running’. I decided to stick with sprinting and to give it a really good crack. And it’s led me here.”

Her commitment paid dividends, with 2021 emerging as a breakout season for Ebony.

“The year before COVID lockdown, my personal best (PB) for the 100m was 11.80 seconds. And after lockdown the next season, I dropped to my time to 11.39. It really shows the difference it can make once you knuckle down, commit, and tick all of the right boxes in terms of training, sleep, nutrition.”

To shave that much time off a PB in the space of one season is pretty unheard of – much less so when you’re training in the local dog park due to five-kilometre lockdown restrictions! But Ebony admits there were times when she wondered if that season was a fluke. It wasn’t.

“Last year I was able to make the World Championships and compete in the Diamond League (a prestigious annual series of track and field meetings organised by World Athletics) as part of the 4x100 relay team.”

This year, Ebony has made massive strides in individual events, shaving even more time off her PB. She was also part of the relay qualifying team for the Paris Olympic Games.

It’s an incredible achievement – one that us mere mortals could only dream about. But the Paris part of her story wasn’t a fairytale. The thing about relay is there are always more than four athletes in the team. And in the end, it wasn’t Ebony’s time to race in the Stade de France. The build up for an Olympics is huge. You can only imagine the feeling of travelling that far, only to find the door locked. But speaking to her only weeks later, she’s already reflecting on it as just another chapter in a longer story – one where the protagonist emerges stronger, more driven.

“It sucked. And at the time it didn't really feel like it was supposed to happen. But when I look back on it in the future, I know this is something that I will see I had to go through to make me a better athlete, and a better person as well. I believe everything happens for a reason.”  

Grit, determination, and in Ebony’s case - grace. 

She committed long ago to running in a straight line, and she’s now running straight towards the next season of competition.

“We’ve got three major championships next year (World Outdoor, Indoor, and Relay Championships) and my goal is to make all three of those again. That’s my number one goal for next year.

Another goal is to make her mark in an event that’s little known in Australia – the 60-metre sprint – a specialist indoor event.

“In Australia, we don't have any indoor facilities or competitions, or even any 60-metre events. But I know deep down that that's my calling in sprinting. I'm always the first out of the blocks and the first to the 60-metre mark over the hundred (metres), so I really want to make my mark in the 60.”

For that to happen, Ebony will need to head back overseas early in the new year to begin her qualifying campaign for the World Indoor Championships. Looking further ahead, she has her eyes firmly focused on the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 2028. A career in sprinting adds up to a lot of international travel and experiences of different stadiums and venues. When asked about her favourite place to race, her emphatic reply is: “London!”

“The atmosphere is really good there. They just know how to celebrate track and field. (London) Stadium is really good because they have enclosed the roof enough that wind can't get into the venue, which is so smart. It's still an outdoor stadium, but the roof is not as open as other venues. They also have a really good surface. The track they use is called Mondo. We've only got two tracks in Australia that have a Mondo surface, but in Europe, Mondo tracks are a massive thing. You run really fast on a Mondo track.

Talking to Ebony, atmosphere is something Brisbane 2032 Games organisers should be making central to their plans.  

“In the UK and Europe, they love track and field. When we do competitions over there the crowd is just massive. In Australia we don't have that. Here, you're lucky sometimes to even have 200 people at your comp, whereas at the London Diamond League this year we had 60,000 people. I find that's what makes for a good event. Everyone getting around track and field and loving it.”

Ebony’s bubbly aura shines a little brighter when she says this. Perhaps this is where it comes from – a strong, determined, talented young woman, who is getting around track and field, and loving it.