Back in action, Sayers keen to turn 'goldie'

An elbow injury spoilt her plans at the Olympic Games but thanks to a surgeon's skill, the javelin thrower is back

For Goldie Sayers, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games represent the opportunity that literally slipped through her fingers two years ago in London.

Two weeks before the 2012 Olympic Games, she had hurled the javelin more than 66 metres, the best throw in the world that year, at a meet in London. One more attempt, she told herself, and then save the arm for the Olympics.

But during that extra throw, she suffered a partial tear of the ulna collateral ligament, the sinew inside the elbow that connects the bones. In 15 years throwing the javelin, Sayers, 30 at the time, had never had an elbow injury.

Over the two weeks between that track and field meet at Crystal Palace in south London and the Olympics in east London, she tried painkillers, massage, acupuncture. She convinced herself that this was everything she had worked for and dreamed of: competing in the Olympics in her own country.

What happened next was the ultimate nightmare for a competitor. In a stadium packed with 80,000 people, Sayers prepared impeccably for the javelin qualifying round. No pain, no warning, no fear of what was to come. Then, three times she ran up, and three times she failed to throw the minimal distance to qualify.

“My run-up was perfect,” she told the BBC that night in the stadium. “I was putting as much effort into each throw as I could, and it was landing at 48 metres. I can pretty much do that standing still!”

“I couldn’t work out why this javelin was sliding out of my hand,” she added. “I was lumping it as hard as I could, and it was going nowhere. It was like one of those nightmares where you are being chased, and you can’t run.”

The pain kicked in once that interview in the stadium ended. The tears flooded out when she thought, mistakenly, that the camera had turned away. The nation, and millions beyond, watched her private grief over the broken Olympic dream.

What they didn’t see was Sayers standing beneath the Olympic Flame for the rest of that evening, applauding her fellow Britons in their events. And what viewers seldom ever see is the painstaking way in which a broken athlete goes to the ends of the earth to get back what was taken away.

The first surgery, shortly after the Olympics, stitched the ligament together again. But six months later the elbow was swollen and sore, and after a second procedure to remove a screw that had come apart from the bone, the doctor informed her that the ligament could not be strengthened without specialist reconstruction.

Within hours, Sayers hit the Internet, downloading everything she could about the ligament and then contacting athletes she learned had had reconstructive surgery. The English cricket spin bowler Graeme Swann and the American decathlete Trey Hardee answered her calls.

Her research led her to the United States, to the clinic of James Andrews, a veteran Alabama physician whose patient list reads like a Who’s Who of American sports stars.

Andrews has a special empathy with athletes, born of his own experience. A leading collegiate pole vaulter in the early 1960s at Louisiana State University, he cut short his sporting pursuits to concentrate on his  medical studies so that he could help support his family after his father died of lung cancer.

The doctor, now in his 70s, always advises his patients not to give up their dreams. He has fixed the shoulders, hips and heels of athletes ranging from the National Football League players Bo Jackson, Troy Aikman and Brett Favre, to Roger Clemens, whom he treated so many times that they became close friends and the baseball star opened his own institute for sports medicine, to the basketball greats Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan and the golfers Jack Nicklaus and Jerry Pate.

Sayers read the doctor’s research papers and spoke with him. With time running out on her athletic career unless she could get help, she travelled to the United States for surgery last summer.

Andrews’s solution was to remove a tendon from her left wrist and thread it through holes that he drilled into the ulna and humerus bones in her right elbow. A three-inch, or 7.6-centimetre, scar is now the only visible evidence of that surgery.
The rest was up to Sayers.

“Dr Andrews told me there was an 85 to 90 percent success rate with the operation,” she said. But he added that the rate would be lower in her case because she threw the javelin. He did not say, and she did not ask, how much lower.

But the next day, Sayers was back in the gymnasium, accompanied by her mother to give moral support and “open doors and tie my shoelaces.”

Her father, Peter Sayers, had died in February 2005. His legacy to his daughter was musical: He was the first English bluegrass singer and musician to appear in the Grand Ole Opry show in Nashville. His daughter was classically trained in the violin and piano, but her real expression had always been in sports.

Growing up in Newmarket, a horse-racing town, and later in Cambridge, the university town in the same Suffolk region, she was England’s national table tennis champion at 11 and represented Suffolk in tennis, field hockey and netball. From the age of 13 and through her university years, the javelin became her forte.

Now, at age 32, Goldie Sayers is back. In June, she beat all the competition to reclaim the national javelin title for the 11th time, in Birmingham, England.

Afterward, she tweeted: “Technically, it was dreadful, but when you throw 62 metres after three operations and two years out, it’s quite exciting. Twenty-two months ago, there was a chance I’d never compete again. Today, I’m proud to announce I’ve been picked for the Commonwealth Games.”

There might be many athletes among the 6,000 competing in the 17 different sports at the Glasgow Games who owe something of their participation to medical practitioners.

There is at least one, Sayers, who knows that without the surgery performed by Andrews last summer she might not now be targeting a Commonwealth Games gold, not to mention the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and beyond that the 2017 world track and field championships — in the London Olympic Stadium.

Nothing will be easy, nothing taken for granted. Canada’s Liz Gleadle and three Australians, Kimberley Mickle, Kathryn Mitchell and Kelsey-Lee Roberts, all have 63-metres-plus throws this year.

Sayers relishes the competition, and the chance to put London 2012 behind her. Throwing things, she says, is what she does.