Sarah Carli

LEGENDS ONLY: happy birthday to Australia’s 400m hurdles legend Sarah Carli, a two-time Olympian running the best times of her career right now.

Sarah’s lifetime best over the hurdles is 54.29, run at the Australian Championships in April 2025. This March she went 52.58 for the flat 400m in Adelaide, and in May she was part of a 4x400m squad that clocked 3:26.92. She is ranked 30th in the world in the 400m hurdles.

Her record reads like a tour of the sport’s biggest rooms: Olympic Games in Tokyo and Paris, World Championship semi-finals in Doha and Eugene, sixth at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, three Oceania titles, a World U18 silver, and five Australian national championships. The 400m hurdles asks an athlete to sprint a full lap while doing arithmetic between ten barriers, and she has been Australia’s answer to it for years.

Here is the part we love most. She joined Wollongong Little Athletics at eight years old, and she still runs for Kembla Joggers, the Illawarra club named for the mountain above her own city. She also danced competitively for ten years, solo and troupe, at eisteddfods, which explains a great deal about the rhythm between hurdles.

Happy birthday, Sarah! You beauty, and good on ya. Have an absolute ripper of a day. 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇦🇺