{"id":523,"date":"2018-04-04T23:30:13","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T23:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bardonnews.com.au\/?page_id=523"},"modified":"2018-04-04T23:40:16","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T23:40:16","slug":"taneka-kovchenko-announces-retirement-diving-ahead-commonwealth-games","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bardonnews.com.au\/index.php\/taneka-kovchenko-announces-retirement-diving-ahead-commonwealth-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Taneka Kovchenko Announces Retirement From Diving Ahead of Commonwealth Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

A rare mum and daughter team would have been present at the Commonwealth Games diving events. Little Ducks Childcare Community<\/span><\/a>\u2019s manager in Bardon, Michelle Kovchenko\u00a0would be tallying up the scores manually, whilst her daughter Taneka competes at the Gold Coast Games. However, a sudden turn of events forced Taneka to retire from her diving career after 14 years due to health reasons.<\/p>\n

Taneka took to her Instagram account to announce her retirement due to her safety. She narrated that since the end of last year, she had been feeling chronic headaches and neck pain. It was only\u00a0recently that she\u00a0had herself checked and found out that she has a health condition and a dive gone wrong could turn her into a ventilated quadriplegic.<\/p>\n

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Pt.1 This past week I\u2019ve had to make one of the hardest decisions of my career so far and I would like to firstly say thank you to medical professionals at SASI for being so diligent throughout this process because without them life could have be a lot worse. Yesterday I announced I am having to retire from diving due to my safety. Since the end of last year I have had chronic headaches and a lot of pain in my neck. We decided it was time to get it check out last month so I had a few scans done, not thinking much off it. From the first scan we found I have a fairly common genetic formation where my scull formed before my brain finished growing which seemed to pose no immediate problems but my Doctor wanted to send me to the neurologist as this can sometimes cause a build up of fluid in the spinal cord. I had a few more scans done in flexion and extension of my neck which found my neck is hyper flexible and my c1 and c2 are compressing my spinal cord and the bottom of my brain when in these positions. The neurologist and Doctors where very clear that if a dive was to go wrong that the result would be being a ventilated quadriplegic. This was a super scary moment. I thought of every scenario to try and continue diving till at-least the end of this season however the risks highly out weighed the options of continuing to dive and sadly had to make the heart breaking decision to stop diving. I have had an amazing 14 years diving chasing my dream of representing Australia. I am great full for every experience and opportunity I have been given. I am leaving the sport as an athlete proud of my accomplishments and with so many life skills. I have learnt so much from this sport including courage, determination, inner strength, persistence, confidence, self belief, to aspire, support and empathize with teammates even if it\u2019s a primarily individual sport. This may be the end of my diving career but I\u2019m not going to be a stranger to the sport, I\u2019m still in love with it.<\/a><\/p>\n

A post shared by Taneka Kovchenko<\/a> (@tkovchenko) on