Pleasure and Pain: How Steph Talbot defied history to create history in Paris

Steph Talbot’s block against Belgium helped Australia secure an unforgettable bronze medal. A devastating injury meant she should never have really been playing in the first place.

Photo credit: FIBA

Steph Talbot still remembers the exact moment her right foot snapped.

It had been aching for weeks. The first sign of trouble came back before the WNBA break, when she’d helped the L.A. Sparks to an upset win of Las Vegas. She’d just played a whopping 38 minutes, putting up 13 points, nine assists, and five rebounds in a gutsy win. Anytime you take down the reigning champs is cause for celebration, and as such, a mild foot sprain was mostly an afterthought. It was the kind of injury that usually just goes away, except when it doesn’t... And it didn’t. In fact, it felt even worse eight days later against Dallas.

Still, Talbot was trying to stay calm. She’d missed most of the 2021 Olympics with a foot issue when she snapped her plantar fascia, and the thought nagged in the back of her mind. Surely there was no way history could repeat, right? A few days later, the 30-year-old arrived in Spain to finally meet up with her Opals teammates. There was a full week before the opening ceremony, and she had ample time to let her irksome foot rest. Right?

“I didn’t do a single training in Spain. We were there seven or eight days, I was just trying to heal the muscle in my foot,” Talbot recalls. “I’d kind of made it comfortable in my head that we’d let it settle in Spain, and I’d still get three trainings in France with the girls to get ready for the first game. And I was telling myself that would be fine, that would be enough, and that would be all I need.”

It wasn’t. The pain plagued Talbot throughout the group stages, but with so much at stake, a decision was made that a one-legged Talbot was still better than no Talbot at all. So, she soldiered on, enduring the agony though three group stage games and a quarter-final win over Serbia.

Which takes us to the snap. Even after two weeks of treatments, painkillers, strapping, and a moonboot, the pain was still getting worse by the day. But while the pain wouldn’t go away, neither would her Olympic spirit. The veteran was desperately trying to will Australia into a gold medal game, throwing everything at the might of Team USA.

She was face to face with Aces star Kelsey Plum, who she’d duelled with on the very night the injury first flared up. Like she’d done countless times before, Talbot made an instinctive and automatic move to drive left. But as she exploded off her right foot, she felt a familiar snap. She knew instantly.

“It felt like history was repeating. I don’t feel like rupturing your plantar fascia is a super common injury, and for me to have no feet issues my whole career, and then my only two issues are both at an Olympics is just mind boggling to me. So all of that was definitely going through my head, the repeat of Tokyo.”

So here she was, an entire Olympic cycle since snapping her left plantar fascia in Toyko, suddenly dealing with an identical injury in Paris. You can only snap each plantar fascia once, and somehow she’d snapped both of them right in the middle of Olympic tournaments. It’d almost be ironic if it wasn’t simply so cruel.

What followed was a period that saw one of the Opals’ most unsung heroes overcome both physical hurdles and mental demons to not just prevent history from repeating, but deliver a legacy defining moment that elevated Australia onto the podium.