Let’s get one thing out of the way first: it will be a miracle if Sam Kerr plays at the Olympics. An athlete’s absolute minimum recovery time for an anterior cruciate ligament rupture, according to modern medicine, is six months.

The reality for many female footballers who have sustained this injury - and there are a lot of them - is eight to 12 months. Ellie Carpenter, then 22 years old, needed nine before returning to play and another couple before she began to resemble her former self for the Matildas and French champions Lyon.

The Paris 2024 tournament begins on July 24 - in six months and 16 days. The Asian Football Confederation has a July 1 deadline for Olympic squads to be submitted - in five months and 23 days. Because the injury occurred while she was with her club, the club must medically clear her before Tony Gustavsson can select her for the Matildas.

The prospect of a 30-year-old striker responsibly managing that type of turnaround would verge on the supernatural. To endanger her long-term future for a maybe-Olympics appearance does not feel in the same stratosphere as risking it at a home World Cup when you are the face of the tournament and being likened to Cathy Freeman.

The fallout of her likely absence is devastating, for the player and the national team she captains. Players who possess the prolific 2023 Ballon d’Or runner-up’s attributes do not come by often.

The addition of her name to the mushrooming list of elite women’s footballers to be affected by the dreaded ACL only further underscores the urgent need for more research into why women are three-to-six times more likely to injure their ACL than their male counterparts and what can be done to prevent it.

Sam Kerr at a Chelsea training session during the summer camp in Morocco where she ruptured her ACL.Credit: Getty

The personal toll on Kerr, at the height of her career and growing older, is substantial. Arduous and lonely ACL rehabilitation is not the kind of enforced break any athlete wants to be having, and Kerr has been through this before as a much younger athlete when she endured her first ACL injury in 2011. But there is a potential silver lining when it comes to the composition of muscle mass, that could help lessen her risk of other injuries in the future.

“A lot of the time, particularly with ACL injuries, one of the risk factors is that you’ve got too high a quad-to-hamstring ratio,” Matildas team doctor Brandi Cole told this masthead before the World Cup when talking generally about ACL injuries. “That means your quads are too strong, and your hamstrings aren’t strong enough.