The two years

There is a stretch of my career I used to skip over when people asked. Two years, more or less, between the ankle and Tokyo. The surgeries, the rehab, the mornings I could not do the one thing I was supposedly for.

People were gentle about it. A lot of them were also quietly certain I was finished, and I do not blame them, because some mornings I was quietly certain too.

Here is the part I did not understand at the time. The injury did not take my identity. It just showed me that I had built the whole thing on one ankle, and when that ankle went, I had nothing to stand on but the sport, and the sport was exactly what I could not do.

The work of those two years was not really the ankle. It was learning to be a person who was not competing and was still, somehow, me. Learning that on an ordinary Tuesday with no meet on the calendar. It was the hardest routine I ever trained, and there were no scores for it.

When I came back and won, everyone called it a comeback. They meant the medal. I have always thought the comeback happened earlier, on some unremarkable afternoon, when I worked out that I was going to be all right either way.

That is the thing I try to pass on now, to anyone coming back from anything. You are not waiting to be returned to your old self. You are becoming someone who does not need the old self in order to be okay.