Junior pole vaulter Robert George set the bar high for himself as a first-year athlete before a career altering back injury kept him off the runway for nearly one-and-a-half years. His unlikely return to competition this spring was met with immediate placements at the top of the podium and, as his athletic career potentially winds down, a chance at the closure he was very nearly robbed of.
During his first-year spring season, George finished top 10 in the pole vault during the Liberty League Outdoor Track Championships and the AARTFC Outdoor Track & Field Championships, and his 4.50 meter jump was the highest of any Liberty League first-year student during the 2023 outdoor season. Unfortunately, even with these podium-worthy jumps coming in May, it was a practice jump in March that would come to define the next 18 months of his life.
“I took a jump up and I didn’t really feel comfortable with it when I was in the air,” George said. “I was upside down, and I let go of the pole and fell straight down. I landed on the back of my head and my neck and I finished out the season because we didn’t know what was wrong.”
Similar to George, in 2013, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo suffered a herniated disk during a Week 16 game against the Washington Commanders. Despite that, the next season he played would be the best of his career, even receiving MVP votes by season’s end. When Romo’s injury occurred, he initially stated his intentions to play through it ahead of their Week 17 matchup with the Philadelphia Eagles. However, the severity of his L4-L5 hernia was such that it required a spinal surgery, a surgery George did not need.
The Montville, New Jersey native said he realized something was wrong when he felt constant pain in his back while working as a line cook in the summer following the season. A couple of meets into George’s sophomore indoor season, he learned just how wrong things were after an encounter with Tim Reynolds, an anatomy and physiology assistant professor at IC.
“At the start of every semester, I always mention ‘if anybody has any injuries and you need a little bit of advice, feel free to stop by my office and ask a question,’” Reynolds said. “I feel like it’s an opportunity for students to speak to a medical professional in a relatively safe setting, but also gives them a chance to possibly get navigated to the most appropriate health care provider.”
George stopped by Reynolds’ office regarding his back pain early in Spring 2023, leading Reynolds and some of IC’s athletic training staff to take a closer look. What began as a routine check escalated into a formal evaluation by the end of the semester at Cayuga Medical Center, where George was diagnosed with an L5 disk herniation in his lower lumbar region. This herniation was not just causing him back pain, but also sciatica, a pain down his leg caused by pressure on his sciatic nerve by the herniated disk.
“It was tough,” George said. “Because I know this kind of injury doesn’t have a timeline. At first I went into it like, ‘Okay, I can recover from this because I’m in pretty solid physical shape, and my body should be able to recover from things a little bit faster than if I wasn’t.’ Then, as it continued and got worse, it was like, ‘Wow, this is gonna be a long time.’”
It would be 447 days from his last meet that George would get the chance to jump again competitively. With Reynolds as his personal trainer, he underwent an intense rehabilitation process at Island Health & Fitness, a wellness center located just two miles away from campus. Reynolds said George’s rehabilitation began with making sure he could function in daily life with minimal pain and discomfort, before they eventually moved on to some of the more specific movements needed for vaulting.
This was George’s routine for more than a year: class, rehab, going to practice, watching his teammates take the runway and waiting for his pain to subside. At some point, however, there was a realization that the pain-free light at the end of the tunnel he was waiting for was a light that would never come. Noah McKibben, a teammate and heptathlete/decathlete, said George’s back never seemed to noticeably improve from the start of his rehab to the end.
“That’s the unfortunate part of his injury: not really, because it was so related to pain and the dysfunction of his spine but [because] you really could tell how much he wanted to get back and how much he, in a way, didn’t care that he had so many problems and he wanted to do the best to get back on the runway as soon as possible,” McKibben said.
George said he wants to end his career on his terms, stating that even if there was that “what if,” he still wanted to have a college career that he could look back on with pride. The drive to write his own ending is what kept him going, even when jumping did not feel the same.
“I don’t know if I ever felt like I was back,” George said. “But I felt like I needed to do it to be able to move on with my life afterwards. I feel like I needed to end on like a bit of a win, so I don’t know if I ever felt like I was back, but it was kind of the realization of ‘I’m not going to be able to do this pain-free again, so I might as well do it injured, because I just want to do it.’”
With that in mind, he began jumping again during Fall 2024. He stayed the course through the pain he felt and readied himself for the first meet of the 2025 outdoor season: the Cortland Red Dragon Open, a meet he would go on to win with a jump of 4.00 meters.
“We just recently started doing something weekly: the team MVP award,” McKibben said. “I send out a form to the whole team, and everyone votes for their MVP, and he won it when he won his first meet in pole vault, just because everyone knows how much it means to him and how happy all of us were for his return.”
George would also go on to win the pole vault at his next meet, the 2025 TCNJ Invitational and Multi, with a 4.15m jump, made that much more impressive with wind and rain creating adverse conditions for jumping.
After a 2016 season that saw him again plagued with severe back issues, Romo announced his retirement from the NFL on April 4, 2017. Despite his recent successes, George said the inflammation that jumping causes him has him grappling with the idea of putting down the pole for good.
“The point of this season was to bring some closure to this chapter in my life because it is coming to a close, whether I decide to do it this year or next year,” George said. “It’s been a big talk in my family about why I wanted to do this season, and how we were doing PT and waiting so that I could be pain-free to get back to that. It didn’t sit with me right that I was just gonna walk away from these past, however many years of my life, without going out with anything.”
