Manu Ginobili: the "injury clearly wasn't fully healed"

Manu Ginobili posted his column in La Nacion. We will have a full translation soon, but here's the meatiest part.

Ginobili begins by going through the timeline of events we are familiar with: the injury appearing, the Spurs asking him to skip the World Cup, him resisting and having new tests done, the Spurs looking at the tests and not agreeing with the national team's doctors) and then writes:

I thought I had only one card left to play, which was to ignore the Spurs' request and look for FIBA to sort of mediate, to determine if the concern was "reasonable" or not, which is a pretty subjective matter.

It was the logical next step. Even if it would cause some problem between the franchise and I, it was the last resort. But here's when a more delicate situation, and definitely more important for me, came into play. To make sure the bone was healed, I had spent 42 days without training like I usually do, without running or jumping, so as to not put any stress on the fibula. And that caused me to go into training camp in pitiful shape. When you are 37 years old, it's not easy to start from scratch and catch up, so we started to ramp up the preparation once the test results were in.

I started physical therapy in the pool acceptably well but when I moved to the treadmill, that's when pain started to crop up, especially in my right ankle and left foot. I did a lot of physical therapy and stretching and it seemed like the pain was slowly subsiding. But when I started to push my body harder this Wednesday, running and shooting, at the end of the training session the pain in area of the stress fracture in the fibula re-appeared. That basically crushed any expectation I had to come up with some sort of plan to play in Spain, since asking FIBA to mediate was pointless considering the original injury clearly wasn't fully healed.

This is definitely a blow for Argentina's hopes, but it's also a difficult situation for Ginobili and the spurs. A full translation of Manu's column is here.