Injuries seem to follow Nicole Forrester wherever she goes.
Even to Beijing.
The lanky high jumper from Aurora sprained her left ankle during a training session on Monday which hampered her performance Thursday morning at the Olympic Games, bowing out of the qualifying round after failing to clear 1.93m.
"To not play it safe and really guard my foot when I was jumping, I think that's really good," she said of the injury to her plant leg.
"Only yesterday in training did I start to feel confident with it. I went from being really confident, to not too sure when it happened to being pretty confident."
It's not the first time an injury has plagued the Aurora resident in an Olympic year. An ankle injury a month prior to the Games in Athens four years ago kept her home. She also suffered from Achilles tendinitis in 1997, pulled her right hamstring one month before the 1998 Commonwealth Games, and tore the attachment to her Achilles at the Pan Am Games in 1999.
Still, she managed to get over the bar at 1.80m, 1.85m and 1.89m before bowing out at 1.93m. The qualifying standard to get to the final was 1.96, or at least a top-12 in the qualifying roung.
After the event, she was satisfied with her performance given the circumstances she had to deal with.
"I thought about it when I was packing my stuff up," she began. "I just wanted to be able to leave it all out there and do all I could do and I felt like I did that today.
"I feel like there are other things I battled this year and even this week. I'm giving myself nods for that."
The 31-year-old won her third straight national high jump title at the Canadian track and field championships held in Windsor back in June, and sixth of her career, clearing 1.95 metres. She plans to continue competing this year and next, and hinted at the possibility of trying to qualify for London in 2012.
"I would say yes," she said. "That would be the longest I would go is another four years, unless it's not fun anymore and I'm not jumping any higher."