Winning Begins at the Starting Line: Sarah Carli

Sarah was just so engaging and generous with her story. She demonstrated great resilience to the kids.  – Brooke Morgan, Teacher, Bega High School

When New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS) athlete, and Tokyo Olympian, Sarah Carli recently addressed students in the state’s Far South Coast she explained there’s times when, sometimes, just making it to the starting line is a mighty victory.

The 28-year-old visited schools throughout Bega Valley and Moruya before the Easter break as part of Olympics Unleashed, an Australian Olympic Committee [AOC] program which, so far, has allowed 245 Olympians and those aspiring to become one to share their inspirational stories with 287,458 students from 2164 schools across the nation.

The program provides students with the opportunity to interact with elite athletes at either school assemblies or in online chats. The feedback the AOC regularly receives from participating schools’ echoes what Bega High School teacher, Brooke Morgan, wrote of Carli’s emotion-charged talk; the children are inspired by hearing firsthand accounts about the resilience their sporting heroes must draw upon.

Though, few stories of an athlete toeing the line at an Olympic Games match the challenges Carli overcame after she injured herself while training alone at her local gym in the countdown to competing in the 400m hurdles event at Tokyo.

“It’s a dramatic story,” Carli said about the aftermath of slipping as she attempted to climb onto a box while with a bar of weights placed across her shoulders.

“I used the story to show the students an athlete’s career – or any career, for that matter – is never going to be straight. There’s always going to be ups and downs.

“It’s about being able to come back and rise from it. I think that’s what makes celebrations, victories, and achievements so worth it. What I wanted to get across to them was what it can take to get there.”

Carli, needed to tap into a deep reservoir of courage and self-belief to compete at Tokyo and attain the ancient, and revered, sporting title of ‘Olympian’.

The bar crushed her neck when she fell forward, and while she refused to be rushed to Wollongong hospital by ambulance, Carli’s partner took her there to have a deep gash on her jaw stitched up.

As a result of her entire focus being on competing at Tokyo, Carli felt so relieved to receive the ‘all clear’ after doctors examined scans of her spine she joked with nurses that she’d enjoy a four-day weekend by taking two sick days off work.

However, the laughter in the hospital ward stopped when ‘things didn’t seem right’.

Firstly, Carli struggled with a memory test – she could only remember a few of the pictures the nurses had shown her – and after feeling numbness in her hands and feet the 2019 Doha World Athletics Championships semifinalist had a seizure.

While it was a confusing and frightening time as a cavalcade of doctors and nurses raced in and out of her room, Carli has no trouble recalling the surgeon’s chilling words that made her appreciate that much more than an Olympics berth was on the line.

“He said: ‘we have to operate on you now or you are going to die in the next couple of hours’,” recalled Carli, who is back to her best, having dominated her event at the recent Australian Track and Field Championships in Brisbane.

She was then given 20 minutes notice to digest the news that she needed to have lifesaving surgery, and there was a 10 percent chance it would leave her with a brain injury.

Doctors told her she’d torn the artery in her neck that supplies blood to the brain. To prevent a stroke the surgeon needed to remove a vein from her thigh and plant it into the area that had been ruptured.

Intensifying the drama was the surgeon who was preparing to do the operation had only seen the kind of injury Carli had once before – as a trainee. While it was performed successfully, once Carli regained consciousness from the operation she was mortified to hear any exercise was out of the question for the next five months.

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

That belief was further challenged when the surgeon directed Carli to keep her heart rate under 120 beats per minute. To provide an understanding as to why that instruction was considered a blow, one academic study of a 400m hurdler cited that their heart rate peaking at 197 beats per minute during competition.

Despite the odds Carli, who started Little Athletics as an eight-year-old with her sister after she noticed an advertisement in her school newsletter, battled on.

In March she struggled to walk down her driveway; in mid-April Carli jogged 100m, and in June – just six weeks before the Tokyo Olympic Games Opening Ceremony – she secured her spot on the Australian team after clocking 58.53 at the Festival of Athletics in Townsville.

While she finished fifth in her heat at Tokyo, Carli’s time of 56.93 at Tokyo was well off her Personal Best of 55.09, a time that has her ranked fourth on the all-time Australian list. However, she said the moral of her tale extends way beyond the podium and any accolades.

“I think my story demonstrates that the Olympics isn’t just about winning gold medals,” Carli said of the impact she hoped her talk would have on the students. “Obviously that’s what everyone is striving for, but a lot of the time it’s just getting there.

“For me I didn’t run anywhere near my best at Tokyo, but making it to the starting line was the hard part.”

Carli, who was inspired to be her best as a Little ‘A’ athlete by Kerryn McCann, the marathon runner from Bulli who won two Commonwealth Games gold medals and competed at three Olympics before losing her battle with breast cancer in 2008, is adamant young people must ‘see it to be it’.

“I was inspired through my being a member of Kembla Joggers by Kerryn,” said Carli. “She ran for the club, and I used to see her a lot.

“She came to our Little Athletics events, and being able to see her around the community was massive. Kerryn was someone from our community and she motivated me to want to follow her path.

“It was a great experience for me to go down to the Far South Coast and meet the students and teachers. Being someone who is classified as a ‘regional athlete’ there’s times when it feels as though we don’t get access to things as easily.

“Going down there it’s even more so because they’re so far from major cities [428 kilometres from Sydney] so being able to chat with the kids and share something with them . . . something that they might not have had the opportunity to hear and see before . . . was important.”

Daniel Lane, NSWIS