Calab Law

Following an exceptional 2022 season, where he won bronze at the World Under-20 Championships, Calab Law has matured into Australia’s best senior 200m runner.

In April 2024, he won the national 200m title and he has become a regular on the third leg of the Australian 4x100m relay team, which in May at the World Relays in the Bahamas secured a spot at the Paris Olympics.

An indigenous athlete from the Wakka Wakka tribe, near Cherbourg in Queensland, Calab grew up idolising Cathy Freeman.

“She gave me hope that being a world and Olympic champion is possible as a fellow indigenous sports person,” he says. “I want someone to look up to me like I look up to Cathy or look up to other indigenous sprinters – that’s really what I want by the end of my career.”

Initially a hurdler and a long jumper, Calab was drawn to track and athletics by family connections.

“My Aunty Karla was a 400m runner and saw potential in me, so I gave it a go,” he said.

After a break in his early teens, Calab starting training with coach Andrew Iselin when he was 15 and slashed his 100m and 200m times. He won the Australian under-20 200m title as a 17-year-old and at 18 made his junior and senior Australian team debuts within a month.

In 2022, Calab also added another element to his training.

“In the lead-up to the world under-20 season I started to pick up my training by adding an extra session with (Olympic decathlete) Ash Moloney and was finally successful in breaking 21 seconds in the 200m and have been working at that time bit by bit,” he said.

At the under-20 world championships in Cali, Columbia, Calab won bronze in the 200m with a sensational time of 20.42, just short of the Australian record. It was the first global medal by an Australian in the men’s 200m for three decades.

He also competed in 100m and the 4x100m relay. It was the first time the current relay team had competed together and they broke the Australian junior record, clocking 39.30.

Calab’s third place in the open 200m at the Australian championships and second at Oceania that year gave him enough points to qualify for the world championships in Eugene, Oregon, where he was the youngest Australian male selected for 11 years and the fifth youngest ever – at 18 years and 200 days. He made it to the semi-finals of the 200m in a highly competitive field, becoming the first Australian teenager ever to qualify for a World or Olympic 200m semi-final. He clocked a PB of 20.50 in his heat and then ran 20.72 in the semi-final.

Calab suffered a stress fracture of his spine at the start of 2023, but returned to win gold in the 100m and 200m at the Pacific Games in the Solomon Islands in November. He carried the form into 2024, winning the national 200m title and securing Olympic selection with the relay team. In June he won the Oceania 200m title.

Calab is an ambassador for the Share a Yarn initiative, which connects athletes with First Nations communities in order to learn about their culture and history and share what they have learned within the wider sporting world.