A new chapter: Unfolding Sara Blicavs’ stunning second act

A spinal fusion had the potential to end her professional career. Instead, it’s given the veteran Blicavs a new lease on not just basketball, but life.

Photo credit: FIBA

It was January, and the now defunct Melbourne Boomers were facing crosstown rivals Southside. With the regular season winding down, the result would have major ramifications in determining who might take home court advantage throughout the upcoming playoffs.

As the Boomers moved the ball up the court and settled into their motion, Sara Blicavs was already in the fight of her life. She wasn’t just battling her former team, but also her own mortality as a professional athlete. Over the last three years, the 31-year-old’s body had slowly but surely started to betray her.

But as she’d done countless times before, Blicavs gritted her teeth and got to work, moving around a screen, cutting into the key, and taking up residence in the post. A beat behind her was Flyers guard Leilani Mitchell, standing all of 5’4, having switched her defensive assignment and trailed Blicavs into the paint. With an eight-inch height advantage, the play was exactly the kind of mismatch Boomers coach Chris Lucas would have drawn up.

But he hardly could have believed what would happen next. Despite a size, strength, and skill advantage in the paint, Blicavs couldn’t hold her ground. Mitchell simply pushed her out of the key. And for the first time, Blicavs felt like she was losing the battle against her own body.

“I think I’ve gotten so far in my career through my athleticism and speed, and to have that taken away from you is just so disheartening,” Blicavs explains, recalling the incident. “I started thinking about retirement, because what’s the point if I can’t even play how I used to, what’s the point of even playing anymore?”

Those thoughts started infecting her mind like a virus. They came as she hobbled up the court with a sharp ache shooting down her leg, triggered by the four fractured vertebrae in her back. They came when the anti-inflammatory drugs would finally wear off at night. And they’d linger as she began preparing for another day of pushing through excruciating pain to play the game she loved.

But throughout the pain, there was initially optimism that through a diligent regime of management and medication, she’d be able to continue performing at the elite standards she’d come to expect of herself.

“I thought I could make it to the Olympics and still play a WNBL season afterwards, but after Christmas I took a fall in Townsville, landed on my back, and it just got significantly worse from that moment on,” she recalls. “I felt so weak and so unathletic out on court, and the pain was really starting to get to me, so it really had to be done. I think I came to terms with the fact I wasn’t going to make the Olympics being like this. You’re not going to make it being at 30% of your body. You can’t go to an Olympics not at 100%. So I guess I realised it was time to have surgery done.”

What eventually followed was an invasive five-hour procedure that infused a series of screws and titanium bars into her spine, with a twelve-month recovery that held no guarantee of ever playing professionally again.

So how is Sara Blicavs not only ahead of schedule in her recovery, but seemingly happier than ever, and now miraculously eyeing another Olympic appearance?