‘I did not want to come back and hated everything about the world’
Olympic 100m hurdles champion Sally Pearson tells Ben Bloom how she beat a horrific wrist injury
“Do you want to see it?” asks Sally Pearson, rolling up her sleeve to reveal three large scars on her left wrist. “This is as much extension as I can get.” Her wrist barely moves. “This is as far forward as I can go.” It shifts an inch or so. “And this is how much I can turn it out.” It rotates less than halfway.
When you consider the extent of her injuries sustained exactly one year and one day ago it is little surprise that the reigning Olympic 100 metres hurdles champion’s wrist is so immobile.
It was at the Rome Diamond League meeting on June 4 last year that Pearson, 29, sustained the sickening injury when she clattered a hurdle and took the entire force of the fall on her left hand to leave her screaming in agony.
The extent of her injuries would later be diagnosed as 12 broken bones and a dislocation. An Italian doctor who treated her in hospital said her wrist had “exploded”.
So distressed was Pearson immediately afterwards that she at first feared her hand would need to be amputated. Although she now dismisses such concerns as the “irrational” thinking of someone confronted by the sight of her hand and arm pointing in different directions, the star of Australian athletics admits the injury left her in a dark place.
“Getting home from Italy and realising I wasn’t going to the World Championships [later that summer], I cried probably every morning for a week or two,” she says.
“I had a tear in my calf that was about 14cm long, which actually caused me to get the wrist injury, so I couldn’t walk [either]. I couldn’t cut my food properly and the little things really got to me.
“To be honest when I first did my wrist, I retired in my head. I didn’t want to come back to the sport and hated everything about the world. I was just sick of getting injured.
“I felt like that for a while but then I felt myself getting unfit and losing strength so I started training again.” Which explains why 12 months down the line she is thousands of miles from her Gold Coast home, posing for photos outside a high-rise tower block in Birmingham.
It would have been simple for Pearson to take a soft route back into competitive action, easing her way in at low-key meetings as a way to test her new injury-imposed start technique in which she rests on her knuckles due to the lack of mobility in her wrist.
But such a move would not befit the determined athlete who has won gold at the Olympics, World Championships and Commonwealth Games. Instead she decided to throw herself straight back into the cauldron and lines up at today’s Birmingham Diamond League meeting for her first competitive action in 367 days.
She faces a daunting task. Alongside her will be Kendra Harrison and Brianna Rollins, the only two athletes to have gone faster than Pearson over the past 20 years.
It would be foolish to assume she will emerge victorious in such illustrious company on her comeback race but, with 10 weeks until the Rio Olympics, she is confident she will be primed to defend the title she won at London 2012.
“It’s certainly throwing myself into the deep end but whatever happens, happens,” she says. “I just hope that my country doesn’t put too much pressure on me to go out and blitz them all. It’s not realistic at this point, knowing where I am and what some of the other girls have done.
“I’m realistic about my results but, in 10 weeks, I can be at my best. I can’t guarantee that I’m going to win Olympic gold; I know the chances of me winning are probably high but I can’t guarantee it. What I do know is that I can get into the same sort of shape that I was in at the last Olympics.”
It has only been a year since Pearson last competed but athletics has notably changed since then, with the narrative having been dominated by doping for much of the past 12 months. For the record, Pearson is torn between believing that Russia should be banned from the Olympics and that it would unfairly punish clean athletes.
In her event, meanwhile, Harrison recently blitzed her way to 12.24sec to move second on the all-time rankings, behind the world-record 12.21sec that Bulgaria’s Yordanka Donkova set in the 1988. Pearson says it is exciting that the world record could be consigned to history in the near future.
Harrison’s run has also forced her to reassess what she must do to retain her Olympic title in Rio. “I think she sort of screwed that up for me a little bit,” she says, laughing. “It really depends on how Kendra’s progression goes, whether she makes the US team and how fast she’s still running by the Olympics.
“If she’s in the same form as now then it’ll probably take a world record to win. Otherwise perhaps between 12.3sec and 12.4sec could possibly win.”
It would be quite some comeback if Pearson can achieve it.