Two days before the South African Championships, Jo-Ané du Plessis woke up and her left calf would not work.
There was no pain. No warning. Just a leg that had stopped answering. She had spent months building toward that weekend in the best shape of her life, and by the time she understood what was happening, the meet was already gone.
An emergency MRI delivered the verdict. A tear in her L5/S1 disc had allowed fluid to leak out and compress the nerve root running down her leg. There was no rehab pathway, no conservative option, no waiting it out. She needed an urgent microdiscectomy, and she needed it immediately.
That is how close an Olympic silver medallist came to losing everything, in a hospital bed, without ever feeling a thing.
On 19 April she wrote what any athlete writes when the season disappears in forty-eight hours. She was devastated. She had worked so hard to be in the best shape possible. Sometimes, she said, the body has its own plans.
Then she added the line that told you exactly who she is. “God’s got my back. Literally.”
Ten weeks later, she is entered in the women’s javelin at the Meeting Herculis EBS in Monaco, the tenth leg of the Wanda Diamond League, at Stade Louis II on Friday 10 July.
Nobody in the field has come further to get there.
” A torn disc pressing on a nerve root is not an injury you negotiate with. Ten weeks from that hospital bed to a Diamond League circle is not a comeback. It is a resurrection. ” – JustPlainJay
Injury was foreign territory for Jo-Ané du Plessis. She had joked earlier in the season, after competing in Potchefstroom in March, that she had never taken more than a week off training in her life. The problem was already there by then. She simply did not know it yet.
The numbness in her left leg was the only symptom. There was no pain before the surgery, and none afterward either. What there was instead was helplessness, and for someone who has built a career on control, that proved harder to absorb than anything a physiotherapist could have prescribed.
She was not allowed to do anything. Not train, not lift, not throw. Her husband Johan, her mother and her mother-in-law took turns looking after her, and it was that dependency, rather than the surgery itself, that she named as the worst part of the whole experience.
The competitor in her wanted to be back in Paris in June. Her medical team said no. Her coach said no. That coach is Terseus Liebenberg, and when he says wait, an athlete waits.
Liebenberg has been building javelin throwers in Potchefstroom for more than three decades, and the list runs through Marius Corbett, world champion in Athens in 1997, through Sunette Viljoen and her Rio silver, through Justine Robbeson and Tazmin Brits. The SA Athletics Statisticians named him the top coach of the readmission era. Jo-Ané du Plessis moved to Cape Town after getting married and kept him anyway, because you do not walk away from that.
Before Paris, Liebenberg told News24 he had known for months that she was destined for greatness and would medal. She did. So when the same man told her to heal completely rather than chase a July return before her body was ready, she listened. Reluctantly, but she listened.
What she has said about those ten weeks is worth reading twice.
The time in recovery, she wrote, was probably the most challenging period of her career. But she framed what it gave her rather than what it took. Time, she said, is something she does not often have. Time to spend with the people she loves.
That is not the language of an athlete waiting out a sentence. It is the language of someone who found something in the stillness.
And it is not as though she spent it idle. She has been explicit about that. She was rehabbing. She worked on weak spots and strengthened them while she had the window to do it.
There is a video of her back in the gym, dumbbells in hand, walking with the deliberate care of someone relearning her own body. The caption is one sentence, and it lands harder than any press release ever could.
“You know, sometimes you think you can’t do something. But, you CAN.”
She thanked her training partner Nadia Booyens in the same post, for being there every step of the way, for keeping her patient and chasing crazy goals with her.
Patient. That word again. The one Liebenberg made her live. Then, at the end: see you soon, Monaco. Now the circle at Stade Louis II is waiting for Jo-Ané du Plessis, and it is not going to be gentle with her.
The women’s javelin field in Monaco is loaded. Yan Ziyi of China arrives as world leader with a personal best of 71.74m. World champion Haruka Kitaguchi of Japan has thrown 67.38m. Adriana Vilagoš of Serbia sits on 67.22m, Flor Denis Ruiz Hurtado of Colombia on 66.70m, Sigrid Borge of Norway on 66.50m, and Australia’s Mackenzie Little on 66.27m.
Jo-Ané du Plessis enters with a personal best of 64.22m and a season best of 57.54m, a number thrown by a woman who did not know her disc was tearing.
She is ranked eighth in the world in an event where she is the reigning Olympic silver medallist. That gap between ranking and reality is the whole story of the last ten weeks for Jo-Ané du Plessis, and Friday night is the first chance to close it.
Anyone expecting a personal best in Monaco is expecting the wrong thing. Anyone writing her off because of a season best in the fifties is making a worse mistake. Her own assessment is that she is fully recovered and simply needs to sharpen, quickly. Her first throwing sessions back, she said, went really well. She is confident.
Monaco is not the destination anyway. Six days later she is scheduled to compete in Lausanne. Beyond that sits Glasgow, where she has been named in South Africa’s Commonwealth Games team and where the women’s javelin final takes place on 1 August.
Jo-Ané du Plessis has not hidden from the expectation attached to that. Asked whether she is one of the favourites for gold in Scotland, she did not deflect. That, she said, is obviously the goal.
By the time the Commonwealth Games arrive, she believes she will be highly competitive. Ten weeks ago she could not walk properly.
There is a photograph Jo-Ané du Plessis posted from the hospital bed, tubes running from her arm, monitors behind her head, and she is smiling in it. When she looks at that picture now, she says, she cannot believe how far they have come.
We are about to find out exactly how far.
Images via Jo-Ané du Plessis
