Brittany Crew still grappling with weight of expectations after injury-marred Olympics

For athletes, expectations can be a funny thing. For some, they can motivate and push them to succeed, to fill out the glorious details in a script that has already been written.

For others, the lofty predictions of others can be crushing, especially when things don't go as planned. They can derail even the most promising of careers.

That's what happened to Canadian shot putter Brittany Crew.

When CBC Sports caught up with Crew recently on a sunny afternoon on the campus of York University, the pain of what transpired more than a year ago at the Tokyo Olympics was still very raw.

"This was the hardest experience I've ever had to go through in my entire athletic career," Crew said, tears streaming down her face.

"I felt embarrassed. I felt like a failure. I felt like I let everyone down."

From the outside, Crew's medal prospects were promising heading into Tokyo. At the 2016 Rio Games, she finished 18th and things had trended upwards since then. By the summer of 2021, she had a top-10 world ranking, had enjoyed consistent success internationally and held both the Canadian indoor and outdoor records. 

And that's why many Olympic pundits, predictive algorithms and Canadian sports officials were confident that Tokyo would be a chance for Crew to reach the podium — or at worst finish in the top 10.

But as had happened so many times in her career, Crew could never get healthy for the competitions that mattered most.

Tokyo was no different.

First it was a strained abductor muscle that was never properly diagnosed and then only months before the Olympics, a torn ankle, which left her training in a walking boot. 

Outwardly she was devastated, but privately the injuries calmed an anxiety that wouldn't go away.

"I don't know why, but I felt a sense of relief because I didn't know if I was going to perform well or not."

She contemplated pulling out of the Olympics but her coach encouraged her to go, and Crew acknowledges that she would have regretted skipping an event she had trained her entire life for.