From The Australian:
Matthew Mitcham has had a rough trot with injuries over the past year
OLYMPIC champion Matthew Mitcham will have had just five weeks of training from the 10m platform this year when he attempts to win his first world title in Shanghai in July.
After tearing an abdominal muscle as he triumphed at the Canada Cup in Montreal two weeks ago, Mitcham is racing to be fit for the world titles. His doctors are using a hyperbaric chamber and injections of his blood plasma to hasten the healing process.
The man who prevented a Chinese cleansweep of the diving gold medals in Beijing in 2008 has had a rough run with injuries in the past year, but is still confident that he will be a medal contender when he returns to his sport's spiritual homeland, where his record is immaculate.
Last year he won the most prestigious event of the year, the World Cup, in Changzhou, although he has been competing in pain since. Unbeknown to the 23-year-old diver, his bid to maximise medals for Australia at last year's Delhi Commonwealth Games by taking on all five events on the program, left him with stress fractures in his spine.
He soldiered on in pain to win four silver medals in Delhi last October, then another national title in December, before scans revealed the extent of his injury.
He was ordered to take three months off to allow the spinal fractures to heal and did not return to training until late March. He worked his way up again to the platform but had only two weeks of practice on the 10m tower before he left to contest the Canada Cup.
Yet he triumphed there with a score of 541.20 points (higher than his winning score in Beijing), which included straight tens for his third dive, a back three and a half somersault.
But Mitcham sustained another injury, this time to his abdominal muscles, the result of pushing his body too quickly after the long lay-off. "I could feel it in Montreal. I had to ice my abs between every dive there and I didn't even warm-up for the final," Mitcham said.
He went on to his next competition, the US Grand Prix in Florida, but the pain was "worse and worse" and he withdrew mid-event, returning to Sydney where an ultrasound revealed he had a grade two muscle tear.
That would normally require 10 weeks of rest to heal, but Mitcham is hoping the intense medical treatment will allow him to resume some training in just four weeks, and be back on top of the tower three weeks before the world titles begin.
He believes that time frame will at least give him a shot at a world championship medal. "I had only two weeks before Montreal so I know I can do it in a short frame of time," he said. "I do think I can still win a medal."
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