National Post (National Edition)
No pain, no gain was golden
High jumper competed with fractured back
Derek Drouin’s pain tolerance is legendary, dating back to the days when he soared off couches and tumbled off monkey bars as a kid growing up in Corunna, Ont.
“I’ve just been like this my whole life,” the Olympic gold medallist in the high jump says. “Before I was five or six years old, I broke both my arms twice. For most of my baby pictures and toddler pictures, I’m in a cast.”
The 26-year-old drew on those early experiences in the months leading up to the Rio Olympics when his cranky back left him barely able to climb out of bed — never mind clear heights greater than eight stacked cases of Molson Canadian. Many days on the track at York University, the reigning world champion looked like one of those marionettes on the Robaxacet commercials with pins in their backs.
“If I was sitting down, trying to stand back up was pretty agonizing,” he says. “If I was ever bent over trying to get my back straight, I looked like I was 80 years old. I would have to put both hands on my back and slowly straighten up. It was pretty rough for a while.”
So rough, in fact, that Drouin underwent an MRI in early May in search of the reason for pain so great he could barely jump. Much to his horror, the scan revealed a double stress fracture that would jeopardize his chances of competing in Rio, where he hoped to upgrade the bronze medal he had won in 2012.
The doctor gently said he would advise Drouin to shut it down for the season, if not for the Rio Games.
“But given it was an Olympic year, I wasn’t going to do that or at least I wasn’t going to do it yet,” Drouin says. “I was going to at least try to exhaust all my options first.”
The best option for a stress fracture is rest and lots of it, so Drouin quietly took three weeks off from training and competition. He religiously attended chiropractic appointments and refused to dwell on his bad luck.
“There were a few moments where I was really nervous,” says his personal coach, Jeff Huntoon. “I felt — no, I hoped — that he would be in good form once we got to Rio.”
In some ways, the diagnosis was a relief. Finally, Drouin had an explanation for why a transcontinental flight felt like an exercise in torture.
“It was definitely pretty rough the first couple of days after getting off the plane,“said Drouin, who routinely flies around the world to compete. “I had to be pretty proactive about getting up a lot and stretching it and making sure I didn’t get too stiff.”
The prescribed three weeks of rest took the edge off the pain. And in the last Diamond League meet before Rio, he cleared a seasonhigh 2.38 metres in Eberstadt, Germany.
“I really just wanted one successful meet before the Games to give me some sort of confidence that I could jump a high bar,” he says. “And luckily, I got that one meet and so I went in with some confidence, and I went in with a relatively pain-free body.”
Relative is the operative word. He still jumped in Rio with two stress fractures in his back.
‘I knew that the adrenalin and the pressures from being at the Olympic Games, they would help me jump those higher heights that I needed,” he says.
Indeed. With adrenalin coursing through his body, Drouin delivered arguably the most dominant Canadian performance in Rio, clearing all six bars on the first attempt all the way up to 2.38 metres. His only miss came at 2.40 metres after gold was already secured. He made a single attempt at the Olympic record of 2.39 before the flood of emotion washed over him, and he felt his body buckle. Gold. Sweet gold. “He’s a determined guy,” says Athletics Canada head coach Peter Eriksson. “He knows what he wants, and that’s not to lose.”
Drouin is known for heaping the pressure on himself, and a couple of days before the final in Rio he dreamed he won gold against the odds. He awoke that morning awash in relief. Not joy. Relief.
“I think having the dream put things into perspective,” he says. “I was like, ‘Not that many months ago, I didn’t think it was even possible that I would be here, let alone be in the final. So the fact that I’m here, I have to be excited about it and thankful for that and just go out there and have a good time rather than stress myself out.’ I think doing that to yourself is a good way to waste an Olympic experience.”
With a gold medal in hand, Drouin is relaxing at home in Ontario and following doctors’ orders to finally give his back two months of solid rest.
“Hopefully that will be enough time,” he says. “We’ll get it checked out before I start training again, and hopefully I’m good to go.”