Erin Shaw should have been lining up at the national athletics championships on April 10. Instead, the 21-year-old high jump rising star from Sydney’s northern beaches was sitting at a cafe at Sydney Olympic Park, talking through the gym accident that tore apart her season and forced spinal fusion surgery.
Shaw was speaking over coffee on day two of the championships, a meet headlined by reigning world champion Nicola Olyslagers and former world champion Eleanor Patterson, a mentor and close friend. But her back needed time to heal after the freak injury in December last year, and she could only watch the titles she had hoped to contest.
The injury happened just before Christmas, when Shaw was doing Bulgarian split squats with 135 kilograms on a bar across her back and stumbled to the floor with a thud. She lay there for 45 minutes with her strength and conditioning coach while waiting for an ambulance, then faced a decision from surgeons: take the conservative route, avoid surgery and spend three months in a brace, or go under the knife for a harder but more decisive fix.
Shaw chose the operation. “I was kind of like, ‘OK, next option’,” she said. “It felt like a huge kind of seizing of your whole back and body,” she said of the moment her body locked up. “I could feel my feet and move and stuff, which was really good.” The pain, she said, became so intense that she felt as if she could not breathe because of the pressure on her diaphragm.
What came after was even more difficult. Shaw underwent spinal fusion surgery in December and spent two months in a brace. Surgeons had warned that the no-surgery option would mean a longer road back and could likely end her high jump career. Shaw did not need to be told what was at stake. The first thought that hit her after she landed was simple: “will I be able to jump again?”
That question still hangs over her comeback, even if the answer is now clearer than it was in those first minutes on the gym floor. Shaw said she wanted to be in the field at the national titles, but she was not ready. The stop-start rhythm of recovery has kept her away from competition while the sport moves on around her.
Her absence matters because Shaw is not just another young athlete rehabbing an injury. She was in action at the world athletics championships in Budapest in 2023, and people around the event see her as a rising name with the kind of speed, technique and ambition that can carry her back to the world stage. For now, though, the road runs through recovery, not runways and bars.
The bigger test is not whether Shaw can train again. It is whether a body that was fused to save her career can still carry her into the heights she was chasing before December. She has already answered the first part with surgery and months in a brace. The next phase will decide whether the comeback is real.
