Mccartney’s mystery illness

For Eliza Mccartney the darkest days of a four-year spiral of injuries and setbacks were so bleak that at times she had to run away and hide, it threatened to overwhelm her so much.

But here’s the good news: the golden girl of New Zealand track and field is hopeful she has found, not only an answer to the problems that have plagued her since her memorable Olympic Games bronze medal in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, but also a solution to go with it.

And here’s the even better news: she is confident that, having hopefully found the right medication to treat what her team believes is a genetic disorder, there is now nothing stopping her from going for gold at the Tokyo Olympics next year.

Mccartney, 22, has suffered an array of mostly Achilles tendon and hamstring injuries since 2016 when she had to battle her way to that memorable bronze medal in

Rio through gritted teeth. Two weeks before the Games she injured her Achilles in Germany and had to clear the pain barrier, as well as some special heights, to do what she did at her first Olympics.

Since then she has been pretty much competing with the handbrake on.

In 2017 she suffered Achilles tendonitis that ruined the back end of her year, much like it did this one.

In 2018, she was dogged by hamstring issues that kept her from really striding out when it mattered.

And this year she has battled, first, hamstring and, then, Achilles problems that eventually forced her to abandon her tilt at the world championships in Doha.

The situation reached a nadir around a month after her return from her ill-fated European campaign when she was working through a routine Saturday morning vaulting session and felt