Women’s soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe played the final professional soccer match of her storied career on Saturday night when her OL Reign took on the NJ/NY Gotham in the NWSL championship, but it was not the storybook ending she imagined.
In just the sixth minute of the match, Megan Rapinoe went down with an injury that she fears is a torn Achilles tendon.
“It felt like just a huge pop,” Rapinoe said after the game according to ESPN. “The worst possible outcome. I just thank god I have like a [freaking] deep well of sense of humor. But yeah, I mean, just obviously devastating to go out in the final so early”
The injury may have been devastating, but Rapinoe acknowledged that the possibility of an injury like that is just something athletes have to deal with.
“That’s life; it’s part of the game,” Rapinoe said. “I was feeling really good before the game, wasn’t feeling tight or wasn’t having calf issues or anything. You don’t always get to have the perfect ending.”
Rapinoe made it clear that she can’t blame the injury on the field conditions. She said injuries like this sometimes just happen to professional athletes.
“I wish, right? No, I don’t think so,” the winger said. “These things are — they just sort of happen, happened how they happen.”
One of the things that upset Rapinoe most about her injury is that since she’s retired, she won’t even have the motivation to do the rehab to get back on the field. She’ll just be doing it for the sake of living a normal life.
“I’m most upset that I’m now just a ‘NARP’, a normal-[expletive] regular person having to do rehab, which is [freaking] devastating,” she said. “It’s just [messed] up.”
