Sarah Carli | The Greatest Hurdle

On the eve of an Olympic year, Sarah Carli was flying. The 400m hurdler punched in a 55.09 Olympic qualifier in front of friends and family, with the excitement palpable as she marched towards her maiden Olympic Games.  

But by February, things had gone horribly wrong:

Emergency surgery off 20-minutes notice with a 10% chance of brain damage, with the alternative an inevitable death within the space of a few hours.

Carli had suffered a freak accident when training alone at a local gym, slipping and falling forwards when stepping onto a box – the bar on her shoulders crushing her neck.

Refusing ambulance assistance, she travelled to hospital with her partner to have a nasty cut to her jaw sewn up before doctors conducted precautionary scans on her spine.

“I got an MRI and everything looked good. They cleared my spine and were getting ready to discharge me,” she said.

Carli was in good spirits, joking about the prospect of a four-day weekend after milking her injury for “at least two days” off work.

But the mood quickly changed as a final test had her stumped.

“I started to get very confused. The nurse was showing me pictures and I could not remember more than three of them,” she said.

It was the first sign that things were not right, with the next sign less subtle.

“I started to feel numbness in my hands and feet, then I had a seizure,” she said.  

The entrance to her room was a revolving door of doctors – the more senior the doctor, the more serious the diagnosis of her injury.

And then came the most chilling assessment of all.

“We have to operate now, or you are going to die in the next couple of hours,” she recalls the doctor saying.

The nurses frantically went about cutting Carli’s clothes off as they rushed her into theatre, where within 20-minues she would be under the knife receiving life-saving surgery.

The diagnosis was a traumatic carotid artery dissection. In layman’s terms, she had torn the artery in her neck that supplies blood to the brain - requiring a vein to be removed from her thigh and planted into the area to prevent a stroke.

Upon awakening from the successful procedure, Carli was informed that she could not exercise for five months – a prospect that did not sit well with the determined hurdler.

“I was in ICU and was telling my family I was going to the Olympics. For me I had to keep telling myself I was going because I had to have that belief,” she said.

Her belief was admirable, but with a direction to keep her heart rate under 120 beats per minute – what hope did she really have at making it to the most prestigious sporting event in the world.

“You can’t do anything with 120 beats per minute!” she said.  

For the foreseeable future, Carli’s life would be dictated by her heart rate – granted an allowance of an extra five beats per minute, per week.

The 26-year-old worked with Athletics Australia’s Dr Paul Blackman and her coach Melissa Logan to devise a careful plan – fully aware of the consequences if she were to overdo it.

“If you retear your hamstring, you retear your hamstring. But if you retear an artery, the risks are quite bad,” she said.

By March she could barely walk down her driveway, in mid-April she jogged 100-metres, and in June she cleared her first hurdle.

Carli’s unwavering resilience was infectious, with a scan eight weeks post-surgery giving her team confidence that things were proceeding well.

Having only started hurdling again one week earlier, Carli made a shock return to competition in June at the Festival of Athletics in Townsville – clocking 58.53 in the 400m hurdles.

The time was irrelevant. She had made her way around one lap and over ten hurdles just months after a life-threatening injury to be selected to the Australian Olympic Team for her Olympic debut.

With a ticket to Tokyo locked away, the hurdler has been working on her strength, speed and sharpness over the hurdles – an area that is understandably rusty with the Olympic heat set to be her fourth 400m hurdles race in the last two years.

Despite this, Carli says her focus when she is coiled into the blocks in Tokyo will be on remaining calm and present – grateful to be doing what she loves on the biggest stage.

“I just want to be kind to myself in that moment. Knowing the fact that I’m on the start line is good enough that I was even there,” she said.

Most athletes go to the Olympics to win, but Sarah Carli has already won.

All quotes courtesy of AthleticsNSW – catch the full video interview with Sarah Carli and other Olympians via their social channels.

By Lachlan Moorhouse, Athletics Australia
Posted: 27/07/2021