Achilles Tears and the Modern Athlete: What Are We Missing?

Dr. Lucas Marchand
Jun 26
4 min read

Dr. Lucas Marchand

Tyrese Haliburton’s recent Achilles tendon rupture made headlines, as it should. He is one of the NBA’s most exciting young stars, and yet now joins an unsettling list of elite athletes who have torn their Achilles tendon at the peak—or just before the peak—of their careers. Kevin Durant. Klay Thompson. Cam Akers. Aaron Rodgers. The list is long and growing.

This sort of injury was once considered rare and often reserved for the aging athlete. Now, we’re seeing it in younger, more explosive bodies than ever before. We are left with a troubling, open-ended question: What are we missing?

I do not pretend to have the answer. But it’s in these moments, with mounting cases and no singular cause, that medicine and sport demand something deeper than certainty—they demand curiosity.

A Simple Formula, A Complex System

At its most basic level, injury is the application of load beyond tissue tolerance. That formula is as simple and elegant as it gets. But it says nothing about the messiness of real life, where tissue tolerance isn’t a fixed number and load isn’t just physical—it’s cumulative, variable, and shaped by systems both seen and unseen.

In Haliburton’s case, many observers noted that he had suffered a calf strain earlier in the season. It flew under the radar. These sorts of injuries are usually managed conservatively—or in some cases, pharmacologically. Tape it up. Loosen it up. Get back out there. But the calf–Achilles complex doesn’t reset like a clock. Its function relies on an orchestra of structural, neurological, and metabolic harmony.

And when harmony is off, injuries don’t knock. They crash through the front door.

The Canary in the Posterior Chain

We tend to treat calf strains as “nuisance” injuries. The kind a tough athlete plays through. But maybe that perspective is flawed.

The calf isn’t just a muscular speed bump in the leg. It’s an integral gear in a high-torque machine. The Achilles tendon—the thickest, strongest tendon in the human body—acts as both engine and spring. If a calf strain represents early tissue dysfunction, then that dysfunction could very well travel downstream… until the spring finally snaps.

This is especially relevant for athletes like Haliburton—explosive, long-levered, high-velocity movers. When an engine like that redlines over and over again, a flicker on the dashboard shouldn’t be ignored.

Footwear, Surfaces, and the Forgotten Foot

Injury doesn't happen in isolation. It happens within ecosystems.

In basketball, shoes have evolved to become hyper-protective—overly supportive, even. They encase the foot in stability but remove the natural play of the intrinsic foot musculature. The foot becomes less an engine of movement and more a passenger. In football, the opposite problem occurs. Cleats bite so hard into turf—especially the newer synthetic variants—that they create dangerous torque during high-speed cuts and deceleration.

The very tools designed to protect these athletes may be slowly weakening them. The connective tissues that once adapted to variable, rugged conditions now grow dependent on artificial support.

Are we breeding structural fragility into the most physically gifted humans on the planet?

Training the Highlight, Not the Human

I remember reading that Kevin Durant couldn't bench 185 pounds at the NBA combine. He’s far from the only one. The emphasis on skill over structure is understandable. You can’t teach height. You can’t teach feel. But you can train strength. You can train resilience.

And yet, the current ecosystem of training—especially in youth and early development—is flooded with sport specificity, flash, and finesse. We’re training the Instagram reel, not the Olympic lift. We’re reinforcing narrow movement patterns, but not the wide base of mobility, stability, and strength that supports true longevity.

Even professional athletes, once expected to train like decathletes, now sometimes look more like specialists. Many of them are playing their sport year-round, from age 10 onward, with very little emphasis on physical literacy or structural development. It's a house built on stilts.

The “Plumber Era” and the Maturation Gap

In past generations, athletes entered the league after several years of college—or even a second sport. They arrived physically mature. They had built strength in multiple environments. Some played football and ran track. Some had day jobs.

Today’s NBA athletes, by contrast, are younger, leaner, and more polished in their skills—but often less durable. Haliburton, like many of his peers, likely entered the league with a higher level of skill and lower level of physical redundancy. And while his game is beautiful to watch, it is also reliant on extreme velocity and torque. No breaks. No wasted steps. All gas.

That kind of movement, repeated night after night, comes with a cost.

Pharmaceuticals, Pressure, and the Invisible Stuff

There's a whisper in sports medicine circles that some athletes are returning to play too soon—medicated, injected, numbed. I don’t know if this was true in Haliburton’s case. But we’ve seen this story before.

Kevin Durant played through a calf issue before rupturing his Achilles. The culture of elite sports doesn’t always incentivize patience. The pressure to perform is immense. Players want to be there for their team. Teams want their stars on the court. And pharmaceutical assistance is often just part of the modern toolkit.

But when you mute the warning signals, the failure can become catastrophic.

Zooming Out: It’s Not Just Load. It’s the Landscape.

There’s a temptation to say this is all about load management—that these players are just playing too much. But that’s too simplistic. This isn’t just about minutes. It’s about minutes layered over surface, over footwear, over nutrition, over training paradigms, over unaddressed asymmetries, over misread injuries.

It’s about the broader ecosystem we’ve built around athletic performance—a system that too often favors output over sustainability.

If Haliburton’s rupture felt inevitable to some, it’s not because we saw it coming with certainty. It’s because we’ve seen versions of it before, and we haven’t yet changed the system that leads to it.

So, What Are We Missing?

We’re missing redundancy. We’re missing patience. We’re missing the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about how we develop talent and how we define readiness. And perhaps most of all, we’re missing humility.

Every Achilles tear is its own story. A unique combination of load, structure, decisions, and context. No two are identical. But trends don’t lie.

We’re seeing too many of these. Too early. Too often.

And if we don’t get curious—if we keep brushing off calf strains, ignoring deep foot strength, prioritizing flash over foundation—then we shouldn’t be surprised when the spring snaps again.

“Injury,” said a wise sports scientist once, “is simply the body saying, ‘No more.’”

Perhaps it’s time we start listening.