When professional athletes get injured, the most common reaction you hear is that their team has to do without them until they are back on their feet. But the athlete has to do without their sport for just as long - not easy when your whole life has revolved around it.
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Magaly Meynadier is taking a breather in the brightly lit High-Performance Training & Recovery Centre (HPTRC) when we find her in the basement of the Coque. The professional basketball player is currently here three times a week after her usual life – along with her knee – collapsed on May 1st, 2022. During what was "actually a perfectly normal jump in a friendly game", she recalls, her "upper body twisted away on landing after the leg was already on the ground". A twitch shook her whole body. Diagnosis: anterior cruciate ligament rupture and torn meniscus. Expected recovery time: about nine months.
Nine months that would be riddled with insecurities and self-doubt. Because at the time of a serious sports injury, no one can say with certainty whether athletes will reach their previous level again, and how rocky the road will be. And it was, indeed, a rocky road. Meynadier had her first operation, in which the torn cruciate ligament was replaced by another ligament, three weeks after the accident. But persistent, intense pain after the operation indicated that the healing process was not going properly. The nights after the operation, she recalls, she woke up almost constantly: "Often in tears. During that time, I hardly slept, maybe two hours a night." The wound had healed incorrectly, stuck together internally – which could only be corrected by a second operation.
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