Back from the abyss: Tyra Gittens on hurdling grief, doubt and panic attacks to the podium

Tyra Gittens-Spotsville’s bronze medal at the 2025 North American, Central American and Caribbean Championships (NACAC) was more than just a place on the podium—it was a statement of survival.

The 27-year-old long jumper’s 6.64m leap in Freeport, Bahamas, earned Trinidad and Tobago’s only medal at the meet, and her first international hardware since the Pan Am U20 Championships in 2017.

But behind Gittens-Spotsville’s warm smile at the medal ceremony lies a story of setbacks, panic attacks, grief, and a fight to rediscover joy in competition.

It has been a journey that almost ended her career before this moment of renewal.

Just three years earlier, her smile vanished on a different runway.

At her third meet as a professional athlete in 2022, Tyra tried to shut out the crowd and focus on the board.

Normally, the rhythm of her approach—stride length, speed, and lift—came naturally.

Tyra would explode down the runway with every stride, propelling her closer to the board.

Her take-off would send her legs snapping upwards, lifting her torso, as her arms swung with precision.

Tyra would then land in the sandpit a split-second later, her body breaking the sand beyond the mark of her rivals.

Her first jump did not come close. Neither did her second. And as the competition continued, her jumps continued to spiral downwards.

On the inside, anxiety was building, and her trademark smile had disappeared. Her shoulders were tense, her breathing was shallow, and her hands started to shake.

Tyra was in the throes of a panic attack.

“I lost all sense of what was real. I could not feel the ground. I was looking around,” she said.

“Why does everything look different? Why does this runway feel different? I have been down this runway a billion times, but right now it does not feel like the normal runway.”

Tyra could barely breathe. A massive headache started to pound in her head.

“I did not know what was real, and that was the scariest thing because track had been just a safe space for me, and at that moment I didn’t know where I was.”

When Tyra Gittens burst onto the collegiate track scene in the USA, it seemed greatness was her destiny.

In 2021, the St Augustine native became a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) champion, reached the Olympic long jump final in Tokyo, and said yes to a marriage proposal—all within the space of a few months.

Her resumé evoked superlatives: gold in the heptathlon and silver in the long jump at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Championships, and breaking Trinidad and Tobago records in the heptathlon (6,418 points), the high jump (1.95m), and the long jump (6.96m).

Gittens was named the Women’s National Field Athlete of the Year.

She missed qualification for the heptathlon at the Tokyo Olympics by two points and the high jump by a centimetre, but made it to the long jump final, finishing 10th.

Just after the Olympic Games, Gittens announced that she was engaged to be married to engineer Donovan Sportsville. All seemed to be well for Tyra Gittens, but inside, she was unravelling.

“After the Tokyo Olympics, I fell into a huge depression. A lot of it was family-related. There were a lot of things going on,” Gittens said.

She lost three women who were very important in her life within a short space of time: both her grandmothers—one due to diabetes-related complications—and an aunt to breast cancer, in a very short period.

“I lost a lot of people who I loved and who were big supporters. I was just feeling so unstable, and that was hard,” she recalled.

“People think you can just ‘run down the runway and jump’. But how do you perform when your heart is broken?”

Adding to her grief was the lingering bitterness of missing out on the heptathlon.

The long jump was like a “side-gig” to her, and not what she had trained for every day.

“I just happened to be good at this event. I was so mad. I felt as if I was robbed, and I was blaming everybody, everything. I was so angry.”

Gittens returned to Texas A&M for the 2022 season. While her performances were not quite as electrifying as the year before, she still won medals—silver in the long jump at both NCAA and Southeastern Conference (SEC) indoors, and bronze outdoors.

After two superb years at the collegiate level, Gittens turned pro.

However, her troubles deepened quickly.

Gittens’ professional career stumbled out of the blocks, blighted by mismanagement and poor guidance. It was a brutal reality check for the young athlete.

“I unfortunately did not have the best people around me to guide me well. It was a very complicated situation,” she said.

“I would like to say that these people took advantage of me, but I also take part in that because I also did not trust myself to make certain decisions for myself.”

Her initial performances as a professional were underwhelming, and Gittens began to suffer from panic attacks during competition.

“I feel that in that moment, that is when my body learned, or kind of associated long jump with something extremely negative because of that experience.”

As a multi-event athlete, Gittens had competed in the long jump all her life as it was one of the seven disciplines in the “hep”, as she affectionately calls the heptathlon.

She quickly found out that the long jump in open competition was a different beast.

“There is less room for mistakes than with the heptathlon,” she said, “I had to relearn how to transfer a certain amount of speed, and I had to relearn the consistency of my approach.”

It was a steep learning curve for the young professional. However, she still qualified for the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, England, and the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, USA that same year.

Then came the blow that almost ended her career.

In April 2023, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) of World Athletics retroactively banned Gittens for six months after she tested positive for methylphenidate—an ingredient in her ADHD medication.

“I’ve been on my ADHD medication since college, and I’ve always had a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE),” Gittens said.

“For some reason, which I do not know why, they put my TUE for only six months when it should have been three years. I did not know that it needed to be updated.”

World Athletics accepted that she had not realised that her previous TUE had expired, but the impact on her nascent professional career was severe.

“I went from number 14 in the world in the long jump to not even being ranked,” she said.

Gittens was not invited to athletic meets, and without a certain level of competition, her professional contract was in grave jeopardy.

“Everything just blew up,” she said, “I almost didn’t know if I wanted to continue because that is career-ending. A lot of people wouldn’t have actually done it because it was difficult.”

 

The ban not only hurt her career; it put her very identity under scrutiny.

Throughout her career, Gittens has equated track and field success with her sense of self-worth.

“I did not know that I was anything other than track and field,” she said, “The Tyra outside of track, the Tyra outside of training was not developed. I did not know who she was, and I did not like her.

“I hated that version of myself because I thought if she showed up, I would no longer be good at track because she is a liability.”

Gittens was at the time attempting to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics, and her inner torment continued to churn.

“That whole year, I was still really learning how to live in truth,” she said, “I continued to grow, but unfortunately, time is time and I just ran out of time.”

Her bid for Paris 2024 collapsed at the Trinidad and Tobago National Championships.

Gittens’ bid to qualify for the Olympic Games ended in a heap at the 2024 National Senior Championships.

On the flight home, she cried from take-off to landing, with a stranger sitting next to her holding her all the way.

“I did not see her face. She did not know me. I did not know her, but I cried the whole flight, and she was there with me,’ she said.

“This feeling was the worst feeling that I’ve ever experienced. There was no way in heck I was going to do that to myself again. That flight, that was my turning point,” she said.

In the year since, Gittens has rebuilt her life from the inside out.

For her, the first step was to treat with “Tyra outside of track and field”.

“I realised that she was only a liability because I hadn’t worked on her,” Gittens said.

“Once I started working on that underdeveloped version of myself, I became more well-rounded, anxiety went down, I became more curious, and my training has gotten better.”

Gittens has also been able to separate herself from her track and field results, and competitions were no longer a life-and-death struggle.

She read more and happened on Carol Dweck’s book on the “growth mindset”.

“Growth mindset is the belief that any skill or trait or anything about you can be changed with hard work and time,” Gittens said.

She also started meditating and found that the practice connected her with emotions during moments of silence.

“Meditation, sitting with myself in silence, that was something that I never did,” she said, “I could not believe how many times I would sit in silence, and I would end up crying.”

Therapy was the next step, though Gittens initially resisted the idea, feeling that she was still too fragile.

However, watching her husband blossom after working with a therapist changed her mind.

“Watching him grow and hearing how he is being more vulnerable and the connection he was making with his thoughts, it was amazing,” she said.

“I wanted that same energy. I wanted that same secure feeling about myself, and I think that is what pulled me into therapy.”

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) helped her to reprogramme her thinking, and she learned how to spot the ones that triggered panic and how to defuse them.

“Now, when I feel like my hands start to sweat or I am feeling that my breath is starting to get shallow, I ask, ‘Am I in actual danger? No,’” she said.

“Two, what is the thought that is driving these emotions, and I will track it. It took me a while, but now it takes me a second to work through it, and it is the full process.”

Gittens is looking forward to competing in the NACAC Championships on the weekend despite being only at “70 percent” ready. However, she is happy.

“I haven’t been experiencing this level of happiness this often in a long time,” she said.

She has her eyes firmly set on the World Championships in Tokyo this September.

“I do believe that I can make finals, and honestly, I do believe that I have the potential to win even though I haven’t been consistently in the sevens (meters),” she said.

“I am looking for a level of jumps and a level of consistency through my series. I want to win, but I also want to jump winning jumps every single time. I want to win every time I jump.”

Beyond her career, Gittens dreams of returning to Trinidad to introduce her system for young athletes that blends physical training with mental and emotional growth.

“I have something for Trinidad, and I hope when I am ready, they will see the value in it because it’s going to change the sport for sure,” she said.

When Tyra Gittens stands at the top of the runway now, she is not chasing anyone else’s definition of success anymore—she is chasing her own.

“I’m choosing to die on this hill,” she said with a grin. “I said I want to do something at Worlds, and I’m going to set myself up to make it happen.”