Crush girl Samantha is a Team GB medal hope at Paralympics in Brazil
BURIED under snow and ice that had fallen from a barn roof, 14-year-old Samantha Kinghorn tried to struggle free but realised quickly that something was dreadfully wrong. Minutes earlier, the youngster had been helping her father to clear a path when the ‘avalanche’ came thundering down on her head. Now, her legs felt numb – and it wasn’t from the cold.
In her heart she knew the dreadful truth – that the terrible accident on the Borders farm where her father, Neill, worked as a stockman, had left her paralysed from the waist down.
It was devastating news for any teenager but Samantha – a keen hockey player, gymnast and ballet dancer – refused to give in to her fate.
Now, almost six years later, she has become one of the UK’s top wheelchair racers – and will compete for Team GB at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Currently training twice a day, six days a week, she laughs as she brushes off the effect the punishing regime has on her body, saying: ‘I’m never going to be a hand model, that’s for sure. My hands take the most punishment and they’re horrible – all callouses and lumps and bumps. I’m sore all over and tired by the end of every day. But the adrenaline keeps me going and I know what I’m aiming for, so it’s worth it.’
Samantha is a familiar sight on the roads near her home in the Berwickshire village of Gordon, sweeping down hills at astonishing speed – she once clocked up 48.9mph – and taking the tightest corners with the skill which won her three golds in the 2014 European Championships and set four new European records in May.
‘I never worry about crashing or getting hurt on the roads,’ she says. ‘I think about it more on the track because we’re all so close together and moving at such a speed.’
It doesn’t take long in Samantha’s company to realise that despite her disability, there are few obstacles she cannot overcome. She is the first to accept she’s come a long way since that afternoon in December 2010, when after days of heavy snow she joined her father and others to clear paths at Middle-third Farm.
‘It was like time stopped,’ she says, remembering how she collapsed under the weight of the snow. Everyone rushed to help, so she had no time to panic but she knew instantly that her back was broken because she could not feel anything below her waist.
The snow on the road to where she lay was so deep that it took her father half an hour to clear it with a tractor for an ambulance to reach her.
She also remembers having no idea of time passing – only starting to focus at Borders General Hospital, 12 miles away in Melrose.
The following morning, her injuries were deemed so critical that an air ambulance was called to fly her 70 miles to Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital. She spent six months there, undergoing a number of operations on her back but without success.
Her mother, Elaine, recalls: ‘After surgery she was very ill and I stayed with her while Neill came up and down every day. We were all still in a state of shock. Then she started recovering and every day she was doing a little more.
‘We took Christmas dinner up to the hospital, tablecloth and napkins and everything and although that was just a fortnight after the accident, she was already as determined and as brave as she is now.
‘If Samantha hadn’t reacted the way she did, Neill, her brother Christopher and I would have fallen apart.’
But Elaine admits one of the worst moments was trying to tell Samantha she would never walk again.
She says: ‘My first thoughts were “That’s it. What has she got left now?” but we didn’t expect Samantha’s reaction.’ Her daughter adds: ‘Mum and Dad came into my room dreading what they had to tell me but I said, “I know I’ll never walk again so I just need to get on with it”, though I don’t think I had any idea what lay ahead. Lying in hospital some nights I would think, “Why
You can’t change what happened... I won’t let life pass me by