NEW YORK — Kayla Harrison unraveled from her bed one day in spring 2013, took a step and collapsed.
“I finally needed to call a doctor,” she said.
Back in March 2012, Harrison heard her left knee snap while training in Japan and thought she partially tore the MCL. Five months after that, she became the first American to win an Olympic judo gold medal.
Following the media tour and the parties, she returned to training with coach Jimmy Pedro in Massachusetts in early 2013. The knee pain returned, too.
“It would bug me, bug me, bug me,” daily, recalled Harrison as she sat in the lobby of the New York Athletic Club overlooking Central Park last week.
Until that spring day, when she fell, relented and saw Boston Celtics team physician Dr. Brian McKeon. Harrison found that a ligament smaller than her MCL was actually torn instead. And her knee had been subluxing, basically dislocating in and out for a year without her knowledge.
“I had a pothole in my knee,” she said.
Harrison underwent reconstructive knee surgery in June 2013, knowing it would keep her out of competition for a year, if she decided to continue with the sport.
What is wrong with me, Harrison thought to herself. Why do I keep putting myself through this? I have everything that I want. A World Championship. An Olympic title.
“But judo is sort of the love of my life,” the 24-year-old reasoned.
At the Olympics, Harrison leaped after the gold-medal match into the arms of fiance Aaron Handy, with whom several years ago she confided her story of being sexually abused by a former coach as a teen. Harrison and Handy have since parted ways.
Harrison talked going into London of retiring if she won gold. She wanted to become a firefighter.
But now, motivated by the surgery setback, Harrison is making what will likely be her final Olympic run. She said she can join judo legends with a victory in Rio de Janeiro next summer. She may have to go through one of the host nation’s biggest Olympic stars to do it.
“When you’re a fighter, it’s just sort of in you,” Harrison said. “Someone breaking my leg in half and putting it back together is definitely a challenge.”
“The comeback has started. #Day1,” was posted on Harrison’s Instagram following the surgery.
She spent six weeks in a straight leg brace. Her apartment had stairs, so she stayed with Pedro’s father for the first two months because she could barely walk.
“You eat and watch Netflix,” she said. “A lot of Netflix.”
Harrison also took Harvard Extension classes. One was in creative writing, Introduction to Memoir, which sparked her to restart work on her own book, with Dave Wedge, who co-wrote an account of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that is reportedly the basis of an in-the-works film.
Harrison was back on the mat training in early 2014 but struggled to regain knee strength.
“A lot of crying, a lot of pain,” Pedro said. “She’s always cried, right? I think she cried more out of frustration that after her knee injury that she may never be healthy again, as a young girl who just wishes she could compete at 100 percent.”
The 2014 World Championships in Chelyabinsk, Russia, marked her fifth competition since returning from the surgery.
“She wasn’t ready,” Pedro said.
Harrison reached the 78-kilogram semifinals, relying on her instincts, mental strength and the gold-medal confidence of knowing she could beat anybody on her best day.
She drew Brazilian Mayra Aguiar in the semifinals. The two have a history.
Harrison defeated Aguiar in the final to win her only World Championship in 2010. She beat Aguiar again in the London Olympic semifinals, what Pedro called the toughest match of that tournament, since Aguiar was ranked No. 1.
This time in Chelyabinsk, Aguiar put Harrison away en route to a World Championship. The Brazilian’s loudly yelling coach was kicked out mid-match by the referee.
Harrison came away disappointed with bronze and a career head-to-head with Aguiar split at 6-6, which Harrison was reminded of during a late January trip to Brazil.
Local media sat them down for a TV show where they watched that Worlds match together and conversed about it.
Aguiar speaks English. She will be one of Brazil’s most hyped athletes at the Rio Games, given the nation has won three gold medals combined across all sports at each of the last two Summer Olympics.
Harrison saw Aguiar’s face on a bus during the Brazil trip and estimated one million children participate in judo in the nation.
Pedro would like as much pressure on Aguiar as possible going into the Olympics. And as little on Harrison’s shoulders.
“I’d rather [Harrison] take a silver or bronze again at this [year’s] Worlds rather than win it,” Pedro said of the Astana, Kazakhstan, competition coming in August. “Mentally, [World champions] go into the Olympics defending your title as opposed to taking it from others.”
Harrison won three straight competitions in December in Tokyo, February in Düsseldorf, Germany, and March in Tbilisi, Georgia.
“Technically, she’s still not where she was going into London,” Pedro said. “But she’s more experienced, more poised as a fighter, more confident. She knows she’s one of the best girls in the world now, whereas before there was a question.”
But Aguiar, who is one year younger, was not at any of those tournaments won by Harrison. And she, like Harrison, underwent surgeries after the London Olympics — shoulder, elbow and knee for the Brazilian.
At Rio 2016, Harrison could become the first non-Asian woman to successfully defend an Olympic judo title.
“Maybe I really could be one of the greatest of all time,” she said. “Who doesn’t want to be a legend, right?”
She will be 26 years old in 2016 and, probably she said, finish her judo career in Rio. Her only reason for continuing would be for the setting of the 2020 Olympics — Tokyo. Japan created judo, and her World Championship in 2010 was won there.
“It would be like winning the World Series here,” Harrison said. “But I’ll be almost 30 years old. I don’t know if my body will be able to handle another four years.”
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This month’s “Chasing Gold” episode includes the story of an Olympic champion swimmer reaching out to the family of another Olympic champion swimmer in a time of need.
“Chasing Gold,” a monthly look at Olympic and Paralympic sports, airs Saturday at 3 p.m. ET and will be available on Peacock the following week.
Last winter, 2012 and 2016 Olympic gold medalist swimmer Missy Franklin Johnson spread the word that her father, Dick, and aunt and godmother, Deb, were in end-stage kidney failure. That side of the family has genetic polycystic kidney disease. They were both on transplant waiting lists for a cadaver kidney.
“Our family is looking for a Hail Mary and need your help as we are in a race for time,” Missy’s mom and Dick’s husband of 51 years, D.A., wrote on Facebook on Jan. 23.
That post made it to the screen of retired swimmer Crissy Perham (formerly Crissy Ahmann-Leighton), who at the 1992 Barcelona Games earned two relay gold medals and silver in the 100m butterfly. Perham had no prior relationship with the Franklin family, but she was moved by what she read.
“You could feel her desperation in that letter, and how important this was,” Perham said. “I did not put any sort of thought into it other than, I wonder if I can help? And if I can help, I should help.”
Perham emailed D.A. The process led to her donating a kidney to Dick in August. The donor and recipient met for the first time on gurneys moments before the surgeries. Deb also recently received a transplant.
“Two Olympic gold medalists, coming together, one my daughter, one my donor. I mean, come on. How surreal can we get on this? What are the mathematical odds?” Dick said. “To actually go into an operating room and have one of your organs removed for somebody who’s a complete stranger is pretty remarkable. Pretty darn remarkable in my mind. In the world we live in today, that’s in the top 1% of human behavior from where I sit.”
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American Lashinda Demus has been upgraded from 2012 Olympic 400m hurdles runner-up to champion by World Athletics after original winner Natalya Antyukh of Russia did not appeal her recent retroactive disqualification for doping.
Demus, who originally finished seven hundredths of a second behind Antyukh, is now listed as gold medalist on her World Athletics page. Antyukh was moved from first place to the bottom of the race results, listed as DQ.
Zuzana Hejnová of the Czech Republic was moved from third to second and Jamaican Kaliese Spencer from fourth to third.
The International Olympic Committee has not changed its results to reallocate medals but can still do so. The Athletics Integrity Unit, which handles doping cases in track and field, said it notified the IOC last Friday of World Athletics’ results change.
“The reallocation of medals is not automatic,” the IOC press office said Wednesday when asked about the 2012 Olympic women’s 400m hurdles results change. “As a general rule, each reallocation is submitted to the IOC [Executive Board] for approval once the athletes/teams sanctioned have exhausted all their remedies of appeal and when all procedures are closed.”
On Oct. 24, the Russian Anti-Doping Agency announced that Antyukh’s results from July 2012 through June 2013, a stretch that includes the London Games, were stripped due to evidence of doping from historical data. Antyukh, a 41-year-old who last competed in 2016, was already serving a four-year doping ban.
“Hearing the news didn’t impact my mood or feelings being that it has been 10 years since it has happened,” Demus, who last competed in 2016, wrote in an email after the October announcement. “I have mixed emotions about it all. I do believe that if, in fact, there was doping involved with anyone in the Olympics that they should be stripped of their medal. With everything being said it looks like this is the case for my race. I’m not afraid to say that I then deserve the official title, medal, recognition, and missed compensation that goes along with it all. I wouldn’t want any athlete to go through this same situation and I hope that keeping athletes honest in our sport stays at the forefront for those who sacrifice a good part of their life to be great at it.”
In the 2012 Olympic 400m hurdles final, Antyukh, then 31, lowered her personal best by 22 hundredths of a second to hold off Demus by seven hundredths for the gold medal.
“Of course, I wanted the gold medal; I will not stop until I get the gold medal,” Demus told Lewis Johnson on NBC after the race, voicing a desire to return for the 2016 Olympics (which she did not do after a series of injuries).
At the time, Demus was the third-fastest woman in history in the event and the American record holder with a personal best of 52.47.
Demus, a 2004 Olympian, missed the 2008 Beijing Games by one spot at Olympic Trials after giving birth to twins in June 2007. She also won world championships medals in 2005 (silver), 2009 (silver), 2011 (gold) and 2013 (bronze).
Demus becomes, retroactively, the first U.S. woman to win an Olympic 400m hurdles title. Dalilah Muhammad won the event in 2016 and Sydney McLaughlin last year in Tokyo.
Russia originally won eight track and field gold medals at the 2012 Olympics. Due to doping, that number is now down to one pending the IOC medal reallocations — high jumper Anna Chicherova, who was stripped of her 2008 Olympic bronze medal for doping.
The span between Antyukh winning an Olympic medal and it being stripped for doping may be the longest for the Summer Games since Lance Armstrong was stripped of his 2000 Olympic cycling time trial bronze medal more than 12 years after the race. That medal was not reallocated. Spain’s Abraham Olano, the fourth-place finisher, was not upgraded and later had his name come up in a French senate report of cyclists who doped in the 1998 Tour de France.
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