Tess Kirsopp-Cole

Quick Facts

• Born: 2 December 1999, Winchelsea South, Victoria, Australia
• Event: 800 metres (also races 400m and 600m)
• Personal best: 1:59.95 (800m), Pfungstadt, Germany, August 2025
• Coach: Gav Burren
• Study: Bachelor of Health Science, Naturopathy and Nutrition
• Junior club: Geelong Guild Little Athletics

Biography

Tess Kirsopp-Cole grew up on a horse stud in Winchelsea South, Victoria, and was riding before she was properly running. She joined Little Athletics at seven with the Geelong Guild club and spent her junior years as a sprinter, winning Victorian state titles across the 100m, 200m and 400m and the national U18 400m title in 2016. Equestrian sport stayed part of her life alongside athletics, including dressage, show jumping and eventing.

She didn’t move up to the 800m until early 2021, when a last-minute relay leg at the Victorian State Relay Championships changed her direction. Her first serious attempt over two laps produced 2:11.62. Nineteen days later she ran 2:06.72 for bronze at the Victorian Championships, then 2:03.00 at the Queensland Track Classic a month after that. A bronze at the national final followed, and ON Athletics Club Oceania signed her before the season was out, with Craig Mottram as coach. A place at the Tokyo Olympics didn’t come together, but 2022 brought an Oceania title in Cairns and a start at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, where she finished seventh in her heat.

Overcoming Adversity

Kirsopp-Cole has carried two things most competitors don’t: a stage 4 endometriosis diagnosis from September 2021, treated with laparoscopic surgery, and the aftermath of a horse-riding fall at 16 that left her with a brain injury and six weeks out of training. Neither slowed her down for long; she won national bronze medals in the 400m and 800m the same year she had the surgery.

The bigger scare came in August 2024. Months of shin pain, repeatedly written off as minor bone stress injuries, had built into exertional compartment syndrome. She raced in Canberra on a leg she could barely feel, ran 2:03.25, and within days it had turned purple and swollen. Doctors at Epworth Richmond found a 15-centimetre blood clot that had likely been forming for months, the kind of injury that can be fatal if left untreated. She told her coach she hated the sport and considered walking away for good.

She didn’t. After a three-month break she found a new coach, Gav Burren, and started again on different terms: less training rather than more, and running because she wanted to rather than because a schedule demanded it. She went back to university and took a coaching role at Geelong Grammar. By 2025 she was racing seriously again, winning bronze at the Australian Championships before a run of results in Europe pushed her personal best under two minutes for the first time, culminating in 1:59.95 in Pfungstadt that August. She opened her 2026 season in February with 2:03.32 at Hobart.

Funding Her Own Way

Kirsopp-Cole competes without a major sponsor. She self-funds most of her European racing season, including travel, accommodation and coaching costs, through the Australian Sports Foundation. Her next target is breaking 1:59 for the 800m. Her coach, Gav Burren, has said plainly: “We haven’t seen the best of Tess yet.”