Nothing can stop Nicole Cristobal from winning a gold medal.
Not the competition of her fellow Western Athletic Conference athletes, and certainly not the recovery and rehab from her hip surgery she underwent this past summer.
The 2017 Kealakehe graduate, now a track and field athlete at Grand Canyon University in Arizona, won the gold medal in the long jump at the WAC Indoor Track and Field Championships last weekend, less than two months after she started practicing jumping again with the Antelopes team.
Cristobal, a junior at Grand Canyon, not only placed first in the long jump, she recorded a personal best in the event, jumping to 19 feet, 6 inches (5.94 m).
“I was very shocked,” Cristobal said of her finish. “I knew that jump felt really good, but I didn’t know it was going to be that far, and it was really exciting. It still feels so surreal, but I’m excited to just carry it on to outdoor season.”
Cristobal’s surgery over the summer was to repair a torn labrum in her hip, and it kept the former Waverider from full practice until after the new year.
“For the first half of the season, I was doing rehab and I was just doing all of that to get better, so I wasn’t actually practicing until we came back from winter break, which was the first week of January,” Cristobal said. “I went through a lot of rehab and a lot of strengthening before our season actually started, and then when we came back from winter break, I was able to run with the team, so I did that, and at the same time still doing a lot of rehab and a lot of strengthening.
“Then I was able to lift win the weight room with the team as well, so that started to build up.”
Cristobal said she didn’t start doing jump practices with the team until later in January, and they weren’t full practices either.
Piece by piece, Cristobal worked her way to being able to compete in the championship meet.
“I was able to just progress and get my strength back and get my rhythm back for jumping,” Cristobal said.
In last year’s WAC Indoor Track and Field Championships, Cristobal finished in fourth place in both the triple and long jump. In last year’s long jump, she finished at 18 feet, 4 inches.
This year, Cristobal’s recovery also didn’t stop her from competing in the triple jump too, finishing once again in fourth, with a mark of 38 feet, 2.75 inches (11.65 m), just short of her triple jump mark last year of 38 feet, 4 inches.
“It was my first time doing triple jump the whole season, because my trainers wanted to hold back on that just because it will affect my surgery that I had more,” Cristobal said. “But that was the first time, and I did get fourth place. It went well.”
Cristobal’s achievements in the WAC Indoor Track and Field Championships helped the Grand Canyon women finish second overall, with 157 points. Ahead of them was New Mexico State with 206. The Grand Canyon men’s team finished first overall, with 196 points.