“It’ll be a long road, but I’m ready to work hard,” said Great Britain long jumper Jazmin Sawyers when sharing the painful news, external of her Achilles rupture last April.
The injury, which ruled her out of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, came just over a year after her best moment in the sport to-date.
Her ecstatic celebrations produced memorable images as she won the 2023 European Indoor title, jumping a UK indoor record of 7.00 metres in the process.
The 31-year-old finally competed again this month after a 20-month absence, leaping to 6.53m at the Loughborough International Athletics Meeting.
“It felt so, so good. I was more nervous than I can remember being for a competition,” Sawyers told BBC Radio Stoke.
“My heart rate was high all day. Since the minute I woke up, I wasn’t able to be calm.
“But, just to get back and still feel like myself, to be jumping a kind of distance that I have opened with in any other normal season, I’m so pleased,” she added.
Sawyers, a finalist at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, did make it to a third Olympics, last summer – but as a television commentator for the BBC.
While her enthusiasm and expertise alongside regular contributors like Steve Backley and Jeanette Kwakye won high praise, it was certainly not her first-choice role.
She wrote on her Instagram after the Games: “I’m certain I won’t be joining them again in Los Angeles in four years time. I actually have something else I’d like to do.”
