Vanessa Low
Leap of faith
It’s just three months out from the Tokyo
Paralympic Games, and long-jump legend
Vanessa Low is coming off a week of bed rest in the Canberra home she shares with her Paralympian husband Scott Reardon. “I do all this sport and training without getting injured
– and then I go and fall over on the way to the toilet,” the 30-year-old says ruefully.
Yet the Rio gold medallist and reigning world champion is pragmatic about the setback. “Obviously I would like to be training at 100 per cent before I go, but I have learned over the years that life changes happen and you just have to adapt and accept things as they are.”
Vanessa knows what she is talking about: she was just a month shy of her 16th birthday when she stumbled on a railway platform in her hometown of Ratzeburg, Germany, and fell into the path of an oncoming train. Two weeks later, she woke from a coma to discover that both her legs had been amputated above the knee. Before the accident, Vanessa had believed she would rather die than live that way. Afterwards, she discovered the “beauty within the change”.
“We grow into any situation,” she says. “You just have to find the new opportunities. Getting involved in sport was a big turning point for me. Through it, I have got to live on three continents, travelled to 60 countries and got to know so many amazing people.”
Chief among them is Scott, Australia’s 31-year-old Paralympic hero, who lost the lower half of one leg in a farming accident as a youth. The couple met in 2013 in
London while waiting for the medal ceremony at the Anniversary Games, and dated long-distance while Vanessa trained in the United States and Scott in Australia. Since their marriage in 2018, they have lived in Canberra, training together under the watchful eye of Ukrainian coach Iryna Dvoskina.
“We have gone from one extreme to the other – from being in a long-distance relationship to spending 24 hours a day together,” Vanessa jokes.
Tokyo will be Vanessa’s third Paralympics, but the first at which she will don the green and gold. Given she recently jumped a whopping 5.32m (in what would have been a world record had the event been ratified), she is one of our greatest gold medal hopes. She would love to repeat this feat in Tokyo, but insists she is not fixated on her distance. “Championships are there to win, not to break records,” she says.
Vanessa and Scott have long talked about retiring after Tokyo to start a family. However, as the deadline draws closer, Vanessa has become less certain about quitting the sport that has given her so much, and more convinced that she can balance her athletics career with children. “Besides,” she says with a smile, “I don’t want to finish my career not knowing whether I have reached what I am truly capable of.”