When high jumper Eleanor Patterson won gold at the World Athletics Championships in Oregon last year she was returning from a foot injury that had prevented her from running just weeks out from the competition.
This year, history is repeating. Patterson will return to the world championships in Budapest in August as the reigning champion, but she’s again battling injury – this time a fracture in her take-off foot.
Eleanor Patterson at the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Oregon.Credit: Getty
“This whole experience has been very humbling,” said Patterson, who has a scholarship at the NSW Institute of Sport, where she is training before heading to Japan for a month-long camp.
“It’s reteaching your foot what to handle, what to do, and even a bit of loss of normal mobility, and it’s going to be a slow process to be able to completely load it up … so I probably won’t compete till the end of July.”
The two-time Olympian and Commonwealth Games gold and silver medallist will have just five weeks between her first planned competition in Monaco on July 21 and her qualifying jump in Budapest to get back to her best.
Patterson suffered a fracture to her fifth metatarsal – the bone on the outside of the foot that connects to the small toe – while warming up for a tournament in Slovakia.
“It was a very, very light warm-up, a few drills, something I would do day in, day out almost, and I was doing some drills on a curve and my foot slipped and crunched my fifth metatarsal and fractured it immediately,” ” she said.
Now eight weeks after surgery and with a titanium plate in her foot, she has started light training again.
Eleanor Patterson training at the NSW Institute of Sport after coming back from a foot fracture.Credit: Nick Moir
The next three months of recovery and training are crucial for Patterson, who describes herself as “quietly competitive” and hungry to defend her title.
“I definitely go in with more of the intention to perform at my best, and if that comes with a medal, which in the instance of world champs last year, [it is] phenomenal,” Patterson said.
“No two injuries are the same, but having gone through this before it definitely helps. You still go through the highs and lows that is an injury; it’s not fun in any way, shape or form, and you grieve the situation that you’re in … but, at the end of the day, I do know that I’ve been through this before, I have overcome injuries such as this, especially bone. It’s familiar territory for me, unfortunately. So knowing that I am able to find those mental pathways to overcome it is a reassurance indeed.”
In 2018, after missing out on selection for the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, Patterson stepped away from athletics for a year, a decision she says made her a better and more resilient athlete.
“I put my heart and soul into my athletics, but to my detriment I didn’t really know who I was, and I needed to change a lot of things within my life,” Patterson said.
Now, despite the odds being stacked against her, Patterson knows exactly who she is as a person and what she’s capable of as an athlete.
“It will be a different year obviously having had such a big injury … but at the same time, I know I can rock up, and I know I can put my best foot forward, and I am excited to see what will come to fruition. I love to compete, and I love to see what I can do. I feel like I have only scraped the surface of what I can do.”
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