Crash left me near death, now I’m in race across the Sahara!
A CAR crash victim told he would never walk again is to run a gruelling six-day race through the Sahara.
Joe Robinson, 29, was told he had just a 3 per cent chance of survival after he fractured his skull and broke his neck.
he had accepted a lift home from a party with Oxford schoolfriend Gabriella edmondson, then 17, who insisted on driving even though she had been drinking – despite friends pleading with her not to get behind the wheel.
She lost control of the car and crashed, killing a passenger in the back seat and seriously injuring Mr Robinson, who was 19 at the time.
Mr Robinson, now a qualified surveyor in south-west London, credits his sister Grace with his astounding recovery at Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital.
he said: ‘ the months after the crash were very tough but I wouldn’t have got through it were it not for my parents and Grace.
‘Grace was still at school, but would race across town in every spare moment to see me in hospital.’
She said: ‘I was only 17, but I grew up a lot in those few months and realised that I couldn’t be a kid any more.’
the siblings are now to run the Marathon des Sables – a 156-mile endurance race in the Sahara which starts on april 7, exactly ten years after the crash. they will be raising money for spinal cord injury charity Walk Once More.