Toughened by a death-defying experience and spurred on by a forgettable result on the world stage, Australian hurdler Sarah Carli is approaching the Olympic year with a newfound focus.
Two years after a gym accident and a seizure led to emergency surgery on her neck, the 400m hurdler from Wollongong ran a personal best in Finland in June, clocking 54.66 seconds. She describes that moment in Turku as "the final piece of closure" in her comeback.
But at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest two months later, Carli was eliminated in the heats. It wasn't a case of being bundled out despite running a cracking time; her time was more than a second outside her personal best, so the search for positives was difficult.
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"Since coming back to Australia I've been more focused and more determined than I think I ever have been, so it may have been a blessing to come home upset," Carli tells Wide World of Sports at Sydney Olympic Park.
"There was a lot of growth out of this season. I ran a personal best, which was something that I had been striving for, and it was a really big closure piece for me, but then to underperform at the World Championships, it was two ends of the spectrum in one season."
At a Wollongong gym in February 2021, Carli went to complete another routine rep when she tried to step up onto a box with a bar on her back. She slipped, fell forward, smashed her head on the box and split open her chin. The bar landed on her neck.
She was rushed to hospital, but after a series of checks was cleared to go home.
A seizure changed everything.
A scan discovered a traumatic carotid artery dissection, which in basic terms means one of the arteries responsible for carrying blood to her brain had suffered a tear. She could have had a stroke, or even died.
Even the emergency surgery risked leaving Carli, 26 at the time, with permanent brain damage.
In the days that followed her hospital discharge, a lengthy blood-stained scar on her neck was a graphic indication of the horror she'd overcome, as was an inability to walk the length of her driveway.
Just five months later, she was charging around the track in Tokyo on her Olympic debut.
"The mental aspect was probably the hardest part [of the recovery from the accident]. I had to learn a lot about myself and how to control really intense emotions. There was so much anger and frustration and sometimes even self-pity, which I had never really experienced before," Carli says.
"So working through those emotions and learning a lot about myself was really hard at the time, but … when you get put in that position you just get through and you come out the other end, which is what I've done."
She couldn't walk the length of her driveway for a week because her heart rate would rocket and force her to stop.
"I'm such an active person and … it was really insane to not be able to walk down my driveway without feeling like I was going to faint. That's a really scary feeling when you can usually just go for a run around the track without even blinking," Carli says.
"I medically had my driver's licence taken off me. Even a simple task like going and getting milk and not being able to do that because I couldn't walk and I couldn't drive — I was so dependent on other people."
There was no chance of Carli's underwhelming result at the World Championships leaving her broken; if she could overcome a traumatic carotid artery dissection and the complications that followed, she could overcome the disappointment of Budapest.
"I was really devastated with [my performance in] Budapest. I hadn't ever underperformed at a major championships before, so that was the first I've really experienced that. It's the underperformance that upset me, it's the fact that I didn't compete how I knew I was capable of," Carli says.
"I think sometimes when you run a personal best you get that really inflated feeling that you're kind of invincible, and sometimes it's a good thing to get knocked back down and go, 'OK, you have to keep working, you can't just rest on what you've already done, you have to keep pushing'."
Carli juggles her elite hurdling career with part-time work as a financial advisor at a firm in Wollongong.
As she recharges over a two-week break over the Christmas and New Year period, she's reflecting on her brilliant run in Finland, where she chopped 0.44 of a second from her personal best. Stopping the clock at 54.66 made her the third-fastest Australian woman in 400m hurdles history, behind Olympic gold medallist Debbie Flintoff-King (53.17) and two-time world champion Jana Pittman (53.22).
"I came off the last hurdle and … I had so much in the back end and I think I knew, given how close I was to a lot of the other European girls, that the time was going to be fast," Carli says with a sense of beaming pride.
"There was that initial kind of shock and excitement and adrenaline, but it was really weird because no one was there; my family wasn't there, my coach [Melissa Smith] wasn't there and my manager JT [James Templeton] wasn't there. So it was really weird to have this huge experience and then all the people that have been there weren't able to share it with me … There was this massive high and then [me thinking], 'Oh, it's just me here', which I guess is also probably a really nice thing, too.
"I'm incredibly proud [of that run] … I guess to know in myself that I was going to be able to make it back [was great]. So that personal best in Finland meant everything to me and it was really important that I was able to do that."
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