Good times back for Paralympian
From foot fractures to lockdowns, Marc Hinton reports that it’s been a tough road for Otago athlete Anna Grimaldi since her Rio heroics in 2016.
For a while there 2016 Paralympics golden girl Anna Grimaldi was counting her blessings she had tucked away that quantity surveying diploma, with another in construction management on the way. A rebuilding project on her career was beginning to look a distinct reality.
But then along came the summer of 2020-21, a PB drought turned into a deluge for this outstanding long jumper and, before she knew it, she had taken the big leap back into the top echelon of her sport. Crisis averted – patience and perseverance winning the day.
Now she is not only knocking on the door of the world record for her classification, and eyeing another gold medal at the Paralympics in Tokyo later this year (global pandemic permitting), but holding her own among the country’s elite sandpit sprawlers of the ablebodied variety.
The good times are rolling again for this 24-year-old Dunedin athlete, though she admits now that after spending two and a-half years working through a broken foot post-Rio, she had had her doubts.
‘‘Coming back had not been as smooth as I hoped it would be,’’ she tells the Star-Times shortly before the postponement of the national championships (now set down for Hastings on March 26-27). ‘‘The form wasn’t there, and it just hadn’t gone the way we planned. ‘‘We originally got an estimate of six months to get back to full competition, and thought, ‘that’s not too bad’. But I hadn’t even broken into a jog by six months and was still hobbling around questioning whether I would get anywhere. It was at least a year and a-half till I was back properly jumping, and even then I wasn’t anywhere near where I wanted to be and was still having a bit of grief.’’
Remember, Grimaldi, in just her third year in athletics, had burst on to the scene with that surprise gold medal in the T47 long jump at the 2016 Rio Paralympics. The then teenager, who was born without her right hand, had surprised even herself with her final leap of 5.62 metres that served up New Zealand’s first victory of the Games. It was 21cm further than she had ever jumped in her life.
‘‘The placing was the most surprising thing,’’ she reflects now. ‘‘I never thought that gold was a possibility. But to come out and do a big PB … I thought PBs had been brewing but I couldn’t put it together and then on that last jumped everything aligned.
‘‘I couldn’t believe it … I still can’t really. It still seems a bit surreal. I don’t see the medal very often but brought it out the other day for an event, and every time I look at it I think, ‘man, is that mine?’’’ It was an achievement that changed Grimaldi’s life, too.
‘‘We also wouldn’t be where we are now without the crazy downfall of my foot break.’’ Anna Grimaldi
Before then she had toyed with sport playing a principal role in her life, but after Rio (where she also raced the 100m) the chance to be a fulltime athlete opened up and she, well, jumped at it.
‘‘We wouldn’t be where we are now without that success,’’ says Grimaldi, using the royal ‘we’ to encompass her support team. ‘‘But we also wouldn’t be where we are now without the crazy downfall of my foot break. Both of those things brought us to this place where I feel pretty confident in myself, very happy and driven. Both, though polar opposites, had long jump at the centre, and have shaped me into who I am now.’’
The foot fracture occurred during Grimaldi’s 2017 season, though she didn’t feel the full brunt of it until she was at the world championships in London and missed a spot on the podium with a series well short of her best.
‘‘I don’t know how I managed to get out there on the day and put six jumps together,’’ she recalls. ‘‘I was literally being held together by a few pieces of tape and a wish and a hope. I didn’t find out till four months later it was a stress fracture in the navicular (of her left, jumping, foot). That’s not a good fracture for someone who needs that foot to absorb all the power and force they’re going to put through their body.’’
What followed was a drawn-out process that Grimaldi wouldn’t recommend for anyone. There would be no surgery. But the fracture had to heal. And then strength rebuilt.
Nearly three years later she knew two things: she has a support crew in Dunedin she wouldn’t swap for the world; and the end product was an athlete much stronger mentally and physically than she had ever been.
‘‘I was lucky I had people able to dedicate as much time as I was willing to dedicate. I couldn’t have done it without them,’’ she says. ‘‘Mikey Jacobs, my strength and conditioning coach, was massive. I was in the gym nearly every day, just wanting to cry, doing these tiny exercises miles away from what I wanted to be doing.
‘‘Brent Ward, my coach, met me one-on-one most days and it was far and away from what we wanted to be doing. But it had to happen like that. We had to go through all that
s…, otherwise I don’t think we would be where we are now.’’
And, yes, she was reminded – constantly – of that old refrain: if it didn’t kill you, it would ultimately make you stronger.
‘‘There were a few comments along those lines from the team, and I’m not sure I was ready to hear them early on … I changed hugely as a person in that time, and had to grow up a lot. It gave me a lot of resilience and definitely brought the team closer.’’
Eventually she would return to competition. In 2019 – a year she calls her ‘‘confidence builder’’ -- she jumped well enough to grab silver at the world championships in Dubai, missing gold by just 2cm. Afterwards she was in tears, but not because of any disappointment.
‘‘Everything hadn’t quite meshed but you could feel we’d done those hard yards and it had sort of come together. A few people asked if I was upset because I’d come second, but it was the opposite. It was just relief and optimism: ‘I can do this again … I’ve come so far.’ There were questions of would I get back again? After that it was, ‘we’re back, now let’s get into it’.’’
Of course 2020 was meant to be all about the Paralympics, but instead there was a long lockdown and then the postponement of the Games as the realities of the Covid pandemic hit home. However the uncertainty and challenges of 2020 were nothing Grimaldi hadn’t seen before.
‘‘Lockdown reminded me of when my foot was broken: the whole experience of not knowing what was going to happen and having to adapt all the time, it felt like we had been there before,’’ she says.
The end result has been a spectacular summer that has included four PBs and an improvement of 29cm. She jumped 5.68m and 5.72m at her home Caledonian track in October to nudge up her national record of 5.62m set four years previous in Rio. Then there was a 5.78m at February’s International Track Meet in Christchurch, followed by a soaring 5.91m at the Otago champs back in Dunedin.
That takes her within 10cm of the world record for her classification and touching distance of the mythical 6-metre mark. ‘‘I always felt like that was so far away; now we’re edging closer. All the pieces we’ve been laying out for the last four or five years are starting to come together.’’ She’s also now ranked second overall in the country, able-bodied athletes included. That lends a sense of satisfaction that she’s, to some extent, ‘‘a real long jumper’’ now.
Technology has helped, too. Since Rio she has been using a prosthetic hand for competition which balances her so well, ‘‘it feels weird to run without it now’’. Engineers have also designed and 3D-printed a lifting prosthetic that enables her to weight train to an extent previously beyond reach.
‘‘It’s really changed the game,’’ she says. ‘‘Before we were super limited with what we were using; but these new ones now are amazing.’’
All of which leads us to Tokyo. Grimaldi feels a strange feeling of calm about an event that still has some hurdles of its own to clear before it plays out.
‘‘I feel really excited to go and show the world what we’ve got,’’ she says. ‘‘The preparation will be different and the Games will be way different, but just to be there and have a chance to put some big jumps out there will be awesome, considering the last few years.’’
You could say she will be jumping for joy just to be there.