19 November 2023 , 12:03
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Sammi Kinghorn competed in the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics and is now targeting a place at the Paris games next year - but that challenge is nothing compared to what she's already overcome.
The Scottish wheelchair racer was just 14 when in 2010, she was involved in an accident that would alter the course of her life. While her father Neill was clearing snow drifts, she climbed onto his forklift truck for reasoning to this day, even she can't explain. What followed was harrowing. Unaware of his daughter's prank, her dad lowered his machine and inadvertently crushed his daughter. Sammi herself initially thought she was being teased, before the brutal realisation that her life was in the balance.
(PA)"I remember feeling this pressure on my neck," she told the Daily Mail. "I started to laugh; I thought Dad was joking, that he'd gone a bit too far. Then I started screaming. I felt my back popping and before I knew it my head was in my crotch. I was crushed right down into a tiny ball."
Admitting she had accepted her fate, the 27-year-old recalls ruing the notion that her dad would soon wrongfully blame himself for her death. But she survived, albeit with injuries which would prove life defining. Emergency surgery and five months in hospital followed, and the injuries to her spine left her paralysed from the waist down. But watching the watch the 2011 Inter Spinal Unit Games at Stoke Mandeville Hospital ignited a passion she has since pursued with huge success.
Since taking up wheelchair racing, she's won multiple World and European Championship gold medals and only this year, set a new 100m record at the World Para Athletics Championships in Paris. But by far her biggest test was coming clean to her parents about the exact nature of her accident.
Baby boy has spent his life in hospital as doctors are 'scared' to discharge him
For years, sin fear of exacerbating her father's guilt, she pretended she had slipped on snow. A doctor soon confirmed her injuries could not have been sustained in that manner, and eventually she came clean. And now, as she prepares to marry boyfriend Callum Aitken, 28, the family bond is stronger than ever.
Winning Paralympic gold remains the ultimate sporting goal, but it is far from her primary focus in life: "Being able to share my successes with the people I love is what makes me proud," she concluded. "Of course, winning feels great, but the cherry on top is seeing them after the race to celebrate."