Spinal surgery forces Klim out of Games

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Spinal surgery forces Klim out of Games
By CHLOE SALTAU
Wednesday 6 February 2002

The once brilliant but recently troubled swimming career of Michael Klim has received its most serious setback yet after scans showed he would need back surgery.

It will render him incapacitated for the Commonwealth Games trials and cause him to miss the next three international competitions.

Klim endured an excruciating flight from the Gold Coast, his new training base, to his home town of Melbourne to consult specialists who all recommended surgery.

He will have a microscopic discectomy today, during which surgeons will suck out the fragment of the disc in his lumbar spine that is impinging on the sciatic nerve.

They will also shave away some bone from his vertebrae to give the nerve space to heal. Klim expects to miss the Manchester Commonwealth Games, the world shortcourse championships in Moscow and, unless Australian Swimming grants him a place in a relay team, the Pan Pacific championships in Yokohama.

Next month's national titles, to be held in Brisbane, serve as selection trials for the Commonwealth Games and Pan Pacific championships, but Klim is conscious of the injury's future implications for his life, as well as his swimming career.

"I want to be able to run around when I'm 30 or 40 with my kids and kick the footy around, so hopefully it's not a permanent problem," he said. Klim, 24, has not missed an Australian team since 1995.

"I have a lot of weakness in my right leg and I can't lift my toes off the ground or sort of walk on my heels," Klim said. Although he anticipated being back in the water within weeks of today's operation - if not swimming, then sculling and running underwater - Australian team doctor Brian Sando said the operation was a "major procedure never undertaken lightly", generally followed by between three and six months' rehabilitation.

Yesterday, Klim knelt as he explained the condition, and reflected on the difficult 18 months since he missed individual gold at the Sydney Olympics.

"Basically I can't sit, I can only lie down or stand up and I've been having difficulty sleeping," he said. "I've been kneeling for every meal for the last few weeks ... I was swimming with a broken ankle in Japan last year and that was really painful, but I tell you what, this is even worse."

Klim broke his ankle before the world championships in Fukuoka last year, and was also disrupted by a drug furore surrounding his former coach, Gennadi Touretski, who later had triple bypass heart surgery. Since, he has shifted to Denis Cotterell's world-beating Miami squad on the Gold Coast.

Klim first experienced the problem, which Sando speculated could be caused by the straining and extension of his lower back while swimming butterfly, just after the Olympics.


This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/sport/2002/...XA10PKAXC.html