She was vaulting toward Olympic dreams. Then a concussion changed everything (2024)

Alysha Newman can thunder down a 40-meter track, carrying a 15-foot stick while she sprints, and then slam that stick into the rubber for takeoff. She can vault upward, lifting her legs, back, and head in an arcing motion around a bar without touching it, and she has a pilot’s precision to keep all of these body parts together while flying through the air.

Newman, 28, of Toronto, has it all, the best Canadian women’s pole vaulter of all time. She won gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games and has taken first in the pole vault competition at the Canadian Track and Field Championships five times. She holds the national record with a vault of 4.82 meters, which she set and then matched within the same week in August of 2019.

If you took a Honda Accord and stood it on its back end — that’s how high Newman vaulted into the sky when she set the Canadian mark. Only 16 women have jumped higher in the history of the sport, worldwide.

But one evening in April of 2021 — three months before the Tokyo Olympics were set to begin — inside her hotel room in Des Moines, Iowa, Newman couldn’t quite make it over the foot-high wall to the bathtub.

It was after practice during the annual Drake Relays, one of the top outdoor track-and-field events in the United States, when Newman was to go out for dinner with friends. They agreed to shower quickly. Back in her room, Newman turned on the water, a little hotter than usual, to warm up from the damp, chilly springtime air in Iowa.

She pulled the shower curtain back, and as she set one foot into the tub, she tripped.

Newman’s 5-foot-9, 140-pound frame plummeted toward the porcelain under her, and her face crashed into the tub spout. It was a direct hit.

“I was like, ‘Alysha Newman doesn’t die in Iowa,’” she remembers thinking.

Newman was cut on her forehead. As the water poured from the showerhead, she crawled to her phone. She called her agent, who was staying at the same hotel a few floors below.

When the agent arrived at the door, Newman was too dizzy and disoriented to get up and open it. With help from the property manager, her agent and paramedics got in the room to find Newman still on the floor. She’d thrown up already.

They told Newman she had a concussion, a diagnosis she says was made inside the hotel room by the paramedics on site, and not at a hospital. She never did go to a hospital that night in Des Moines. Instead, she said, her handlers and Athletics Canada, the nation’s governing body for track and field, sent her to a training camp.

“And that’s kind of where everything fell apart and got worse,” Newman said.

Newman may not have died that night in Iowa, but her career nearly did.

Ranked top-five in the world, just a couple of months after her fall, she stumbled badly at the Olympics. If setting the Canadian record was like jumping over a car standing on its end, then she couldn’t make it to the dashboard in Tokyo. She did not clear a single jump, failing to get over a bar 4.25 meters high.

Her failure on the Tokyo track is only part of her cautionary tale about the danger of concussions in sport and the importance of heeding warning signs that something is wrong mentally. From nearly the moment Newman hit her head, she says she was faced with crippling anxiety. Worse than anything she’d seen before.

“I had, like, (these) crazy emotions like, ‘We’re f—–,’” she said. “There were days that I woke up crying and felt completely depressed and didn’t want to live.”

As her fears mounted, she took to drinking heavily. But she felt she couldn’t exactly tell that to her coaches and doctors. She described boozy afternoon sessions in the middle of the week in the summer, a month before the Olympics — something she had never done before.

Things weren’t getting better for Newman on the track, either. She said she couldn’t see the box — the 1-meter area in pole vaulting to stake the pole and make the jump — until it was almost too late. Off the track, she often struggled to walk up or down the stairs, and sometimes fell into the wall or railing. She wouldn’t realize it until months after the Olympics, but she’d lost the ability to look at a picture of a dog and a cat and articulate which animal was which. She knew the answer, but couldn’t say the word.

To summarize, Newman was in no shape to compete at the Olympics, but she was out there anyway. For that, she blames both Canadian team doctors and the pressure she felt to fulfill contractual obligations with sponsors.

“I didn’t really understand why (the team doctors) thought it was just me having anxiety about the Olympics,” she said. “They really convinced me that I was just nervous and the pressure was getting to me.”

“I said it so many times that I wasn’t OK, and they didn’t know what to do — they didn’t know how to help,” Newman, who credits the eventual alleviating of her symptoms to the care she received after the Olympics from a Los Angeles doctor who diagnosed her with nerve damage at the base of her brain. “They just assumed I was, like, good (recovered from the concussion). They stopped treating me. They were like, the Olympics are coming up and we have 80 other athletes to monitor and be ready for.”

In a statement to The Athletic, the Canadian track team’s chief medical officer, Dr. Paddy McCluskey, said, “We regret that Ms. Newman feels that adequate care was not provided.

“The (Athletics Canada) medical team members care deeply about our athletes and work diligently with athletes and their personal health-care team to ensure that the best care possible is provided to all athletes,” Dr. McCluskey said. “Athletics Canada acknowledges that managing any athlete’s injury or illness can be more challenging when multiple health care providers are involved. We recognize that our communication with all those involved in this care, both within our organization and those part of an athlete’s personal health-care team, needs to be better so that everyone involved is aware of the goals of care and an athlete’s current status. We are instituting measures to ensure that there is clear and effective communication among those involved when it comes to athletes being cleared to return to full participation in their sport.

“We support Ms. Newman in her return to the top level of her sport and encourage her to work with all involved during this process.”

Newman could have put a stop to competing in Tokyo too, much like Simone Biles did the week before Newman took to the track at the Olympics. Biles, the world-famous American gymnast and one of the most decorated Olympians in the sport, pulled out of individual competition while in Tokyo to focus on her mental health.

“I do remember reading about Simone, and I was like, ‘F—, I’m feeling the same too,’” Newman said. “But I didn’t want to tell people that. I more so wanted that week to be over.”

Newman did not want to say which of her sponsors required her to be on TV in Tokyo, or how much money was on the line, but she said some of her endorsem*nt deals required her to speak on camera during the Olympics for at least 30 seconds.

Like virtually all Olympians, Newman makes most of her money outside of her sport, through endorsem*nts, and it takes years to build up a portfolio to live comfortably. She said when she first signed with Nike more than six years ago, the shoe conglomerate offered her $5,000. Her second contract was worth much more, and included incentives. She’s had contracts with Nordstrom’s, Cadillac and Maui Jim sunglasses, to name a few, and regularly promotes products in posts to her 600,000 Instagram followers.

One commercial Newman had done in the run-up to the Olympics was front of mind, both that night on the track and the next morning as she boarded a plane for Toronto. The ad was for Queen Street Bakery, and in it, she celebrated how good gold looked on her. The commercial aired over and over again, on the country’s major sports cable channel — TSN.

She was thinking about that commercial as she walked from the track onto media row in Tokyo, to do a tearful interview broadcast across Canada.

“It was just me breaking down and being my raw self and just telling people what happened, and my body is not connecting and something needs to change,” she said. “And (my appearance) was rooted in contracts. They signed me for my athletic ability. Sometimes companies don’t sign me for wearing their stuff. If I’m promoting an energy drink, they signed me for my name being behind it, so I need to be seen.”

Her flight out of Tokyo, home to Toronto, was set for the day after she’d failed on the track. From the moment she stepped on that Air Canada flight, she says she was ordering flutes of champagne — so much that, when the plane landed, she says local authorities escorted her off. They took her to her mother, who was waiting for her.

“My heart hurt,” Newman said. “I was already numb, but I wanted to feel nothing.”

She went home and slept. When she finally checked her phone, there were 688 text messages waiting. She realized her “circle” was too big, that too many people had access to her.

Today, Newman has a new number, and far fewer people know it. She says her life is quieter and more stable. She’s learned breathing exercises for lingering anxiety. She also took six months off from training at her doctor’s urging.

Today, Newman is ranked 26th in the world — and still No. 1 in Canada — in her sport. She was back on the track in May and vaulted 4.70 meters, equaling the world’s standard, but had to cut her season short in August because of a heel injury. The Canadian team initially chose to cut her off from its “elite” funding list — for Olympians and Olympic-bound athletes — but she appealed in November and was restored. The funding is a $21,000 annual stipend.

Newman has been an Olympic hopeful since age 6, when she was quickly moving up the ranks in gymnastics. A back injury knocked her out of that sport as a young teenager, but she found her way onto the track and eventually the pole vault. She won gold at the 2013 Pan American Junior Championships; in 2016, she won the Atlantic Coast Conference title at the University of Miami and finished second at the NCAA Championships. She qualified for her first Olympics the same year, where she finished 17th in Rio de Janeiro, and was signed by Nike immediately after. Then came the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games and her climb up to near the top of the world rankings.

With that kind of background, Newman wants nothing more than to cap her career by becoming the first Canadian female pole vaulter to medal at the Olympics, putting back together the final piece of an athletic life that cracked apart the moment she fell in that bathtub in Iowa.

“I wanted to set myself up so I didn’t have to work, and I did exactly that,” Newman said. “I felt so successful and I felt so content and I felt so rewarded. It felt just as good as jumping for the record. I think I’m able to calm down the overthinking of my Olympic shortfalls and focus on what was really important in my life and realize it’s not the end of the world just because of everything I went through.

“Stepping away from track and field and not making it my priority gave me more fire to make it my priority again,” Newman added. “If there’s a female athlete and candidate to bring home an Olympic medal (in pole vault), the first one ever, it would be me.”

(Top photo: Cameron Spencer / Getty Images)