Aussie's 'crazy' road from dancer to Olympic push

Some of the girls Australian track sprinter Bree Masters used to light up the stage with are now wowing crowds in New York City, making her wonder what life could look like if she hadn’t stopped dancing.

Adelaide’s SA Athletics Stadium will be the stage for Masters when she lines up at the Australian Track and Field Championships on Friday afternoon, getting her 100m campaign under way.

The Sydney product dabbled in track sprinting during high school, but was more serious about beach sprinting, in which she won world and national titles, and dancing.

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She was a contemporary dancer at Sydney’s Newtown High School of the Performing Arts.

She took up a full-time dance course after Year 12 wrapped up, but quit soon after.

Some 10 years on, she’s living on the Gold Coast and gunning for a spot on the Australian athletics Olympic team for the Paris Games.

“Moving to the track opened up a whole new set of goals and ‘what could be?’ for me, and now four years later I’ve been to two world championships, I have a Commonwealth Games bronze medal and now I just want to put the icing on the cake and go to the Paris Olympics,” Masters tells Wide World of Sports.

“It’s been a bit of a journey … It’s been crazy.

“All of my friends who I went to school with — some of them are with the New York City Rockettes, some went to Sydney Dance Company, some went to be back-up dancers for professional singers. I still see them to this day doing that and I’m like, ‘What if that was my life?’.”

She had a picture in her mind of what the dance course would look like, but found out quickly it was not for her.

“I don’t think I really enjoyed the course I was doing at the time. It really turned me off,” Masters says.

“And I was succeeding in Surf Life Saving at the time, so I feel like there were two things I was quite good at and I didn’t really know where to go.

“I also had people … in my ear being like, ‘Come to the Gold Coast’.

“It was really weird. It just happened all so quickly and I just left it all behind. It was very strange because I was dancing every day and then next minute I was not dancing at all.”

Masters has a legal 100m personal best of 11.23 seconds.

She was a member of the Australian relay team that finished fourth in the women’s 4x100m at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, before being handed bronze medals after the Nigerian team was disqualified because of an anti-doping violation.

Masters has to chop her personal best down to 11.07 if she’s to qualify by time as an individual for the Paris Games. It’s an enormous task — it’s 0.03 of a second quicker than the Australian women’s record.

But competing in Paris as a relay runner is another of her goals.

“I thought I would be in a full-time dance company and now I think, ‘Wow, I’m glad I didn’t do that because I love what I do so much now’, and I’m grateful for the path life has taken me on’,” Masters says.

“In Surf [Life Saving] I loved being able to hit my top speed and go as fast as I could. But sand is a very soft surface, so you’re not really hitting those top speeds and I feel like it’s just a grind the entire way, whereas when I went to the track I was like, ‘Woah, what is this next level of speed that I’m hitting? This is so much fun’.”