Tia-Clair Toomey
Quick Facts
Biography
Tia-Clair Toomey (born 22 July 1993) is an Australian weightlifter. She competed in the women's 58 kg event at the 2016 Summer Olympics and came in 14th.
She qualified for the Olympics after just 18 months of serious weightlifting training after learning by participating in CrossFit. She is also an established CrossFit Games competitor and has finished second overall in both the 2015 and 2016 CrossFit Games. Since she participated in the Olympics less than a month after finishing the 2016 CrossFit Games, she garnered some criticism for not being a focused sport-specific athlete like many she qualified over. Many CrossFit writers defended Toomey's performance citing that she did as well as could be expected from any competitor within the Australian Weightlifting Federation, a nation that only qualified to bring two weightlifting athletes to Rio (compared to an exceptional weightlifting federation, such as China, that qualified to bring ten athletes).