Robbie Grabarz’s silver 'worth more than London Olympics 2012 medal'

Grabarz jumped throughout the 2013 season and the early part of 2014 with pain in his left take-off knee

Robbie Grabarz has overcome a major knee injury to return (AFP)

British high jumper Robbie Grabarz believes his silver at the World Indoors here eclipsed the bronze won in front of his home crowd at London 2012.

A first-time clearance of 2.33 metres was enough to give the Briton, who feared he would never jump competitively again following surgery nearly two years ago, second place behind Italian Gianmarco Tamberi.

“I think it was probably a little bit more exciting to be honest,” he said when asked to compare it to his Olympic medal. “I just really feel like I’ve earned this one.

“The London Olympics, I was expecting that of myself whereas here it was a case of come in and do what you can and try and earn something. It’s been a really long four years since then.”

Grabarz jumped throughout the 2013 season and the early part of 2014 with pain in his left take-off knee, keeping the problem secret from everyone bar his coach Fuzz Caan and eventually underwent surgery to rectify the problem.

A planned 45-minute operation ended up stretching to three and a half hours as his surgeon uncovered the extent of the problem: two bursas (fluid-filled cushions between bones and tendons) were removed, he had tendons scraped, his bone shaved and some cartilage removed.

In his first jumping session, he could not even clear 1.80m and recalled: “That was probably the most depressing day of my life – 1.80m, that’s a 16-year-old girl’s performance. I couldn’t do it and what a pretty depressing place to be.”

And in his first competition back in the United States he could only muster 2.16m but slowly the athlete, who dominated his discipline for much of 2012, in which he was crowned European champion and won the Diamond League circuit, has recaptured his old form.

Of his comeback from that lowest ebb, he said: “If someone said I’d get that result two years ago I wouldn’t have believed it, I would have bitten their hand off.

“They [the days of being at the top again] looked very far away and that just made me train harder. When I really didn’t want to get out of bed those days made me get there, and then to get the reward here of being able to compete with these guys and get a medal makes it just great.”

Grabarz, who said the silver would give him confidence to target a medal in Rio, added that the medal was made even more special by doing it as a father for the first time. His daughter Lyra was born 10 months ago and named after the lead character in Philip Pullman’s book Northern Lights, after she first kicked in the womb while her parents were visiting Iceland.

Britain’s hopes of another medal were dashed when Dina Asher-Smith pulled out of the women’s 60 metres final following a hamstring scare.

Arguably the most popular win of the night was American 800m runner Boris Berian.

Russian 400m runner Nadezhda Kotlyarova, the 2013 European Championship silver medallist, has tested positive for meldonium. She is the 13th Russian athlete to test positive for the drug since it was banned on 1 January.