Paralympian Sammi Kinghorn: 'My safe space is in a lambing shed'
By the age of nine, Sammi Kinghorn could deliver a lamb by Caesarean, sew up a prolapsing ewe and fit a sheep with an intravenous drip.
She lived on a 1,200-acre farm in the Scottish Borders, where her dad, Neil, was a stockman and spent as much time as she could outside: “As soon as I came home from school, I would pull on my wellies and run off to find Dad. I was his shadow.”
In December 2010, when Sammi was 14, everything changed. Neil was driving his forklift, digging out cows and sheep from five-foot piles of snow. Sammi was close by and, in a fateful moment, leapt onto the truck. She thought her dad had seen her. He hadn’t. She was crushed inside.
Sammi had broken her back and spent the next six months in a spinal unit in Glasgow. She would never walk again.
“I think it affected my family a lot more than it affected me,” she says today at home in Cheshire. “As a 14-year-old, you don’t consider the future. I wasn’t thinking about whether I’d be able to get married and have kids. I was thinking, ‘I’ve got a biology test on Monday. Someone needs to tell the teacher I’m going to miss it.’”
Was Sammi in denial? Was she protecting herself? Or was this an example of an incredible mental resilience that came from being a farmer’s daughter?
“Mum and Dad were amazing, but they worked a lot. If I fell over and grazed my knee, they didn’t have half an hour to kiss it better,” says Sammi pragmatically. “I was aware from a young age that if you make a mistake, you own up to it and get on with it. I thought, ‘I’ve got nobody to blame for this accident but myself. Now, I have to deal with the consequences.’”
That spring, Sammi went to the Inter Spinal Unit Games at Stoke Mandeville Stadium in Buckinghamshire, where patients are encouraged to try wheelchair sports. Sammi had a go at everything: basketball, fencing, tennis, archery, curling – and, finally, athletics. “I couldn’t see how I could do it without using my legs,” says Sammi. Then she saw a girl speeding round the track: “She looked really strong and really cool. I knew straight away that’s what I wanted to do.”
Ian Thompson, coach and husband of Paralympic athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson, watched Sammi from the sidelines: “Ian said, ‘You’ve got a strong upper body; you could be really good at this,’” recalls Sammi. Was her build genetic? “It was from me trying to keep up with Dad and lifting feed when it was a bit too heavy,” Sammi smiles.
Back home, reality hit: “The thing I found most daunting was thinking people at school wouldn’t want to speak to me anymore.” Sammi still had heaps of friends, but her life had taken another direction. She had a new passion: wheelchair racing.
First thing in the morning, she pushed up and down the hills near the farm. Her dad also built her rollers – a treadmill for wheelchairs – out of parts from a combine harvester. “It was so heavy,” says Sammi. “My coach came to see me train one day and went, ‘That’s how you go so strong so quick!’” Wheelchair racing didn’t just improve Sammi’s physical health: “It gave me the opportunity to do something and be someone different. I didn’t have to try to be the same as I was because I wasn’t the same.”
In 2012, Sammi took part in her first race, the London Mini Marathon, a 2.6km route for runners, walkers and wheelers under 18. “There were so many wheelchair racers,” says Sammi, who came second. “It made me feel I was in the right place.” Later that year, her mum, Elaine, took Sammi to the London Paralympics: “I was in awe. I was watching Hannah [Cockcroft] and David [Weir] and thinking, ‘They’re ordinary people from Britain. If they can do it, why can’t I?’”
Soon, Sammi was winning medals of her own, scooping three golds at the European Championships in 2014 and a bronze at the World Championships the following year. In 2016, she qualified for the Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. “I didn’t realise how seriously [athletes] took it,” says Sammi. “At other races, we chatted beforehand. At Rio, nobody spoke. I freaked out with the pressure.” Sammi placed fifth and sixth in the 100m and 400m T53 events.
Sammi worked on building up her self-belief, telling herself she deserved to be at competitions as much as anyone else. “The mental training is the hardest part in sport,” she says. “With enough motivation, anyone can be physically fit… The winners are the ones who believe in themselves so much that they can push themselves the hardest. If you don’t believe you can win, you never will.”
At Tokyo 2020, Sammi won a bronze in the T53 100m and silver in the 400m. Now, the challenges were different. “When I won my first Paralympic medal, I put it in a drawer because I had another race the next morning and needed to sleep. I had to pretend to myself that I hadn’t won to lower my adrenaline.”
At Paris, Sammi is aiming to compete in the 100m, 400m, 800m and 1,500m events. For luck, she will be taking a necklace her brother Christopher gave her just after her accident, with the words, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But that won’t quash her nerves. Sammi is sick before every race. “[On the start line], I think, ‘Why am I doing this?’,” she says. “But once the gun goes, I’m in my element… I hear the crowd coming in and out, and my breath, but I can never remember a full race because I’m so focused. When I cross the finish, I feel elated. It’s a proper electric feeling.”
In the run-up, she has been training hard. A full schedule comprises two sessions a day, six days a week. “I’m always tired, I’m always sore,” says Sammi. But it’s worth it. “I want to train harder and be the best because I want to make everyone around me proud. I’ve always been a people pleaser. People think of it in a negative light, but it’s helped me achieve.” Perhaps no one is prouder than Sammi’s parents, especially her dad: “I think watching what’s come from [the accident] makes him feel better. He knows I enjoy what I’m doing.”
Training feels almost as good as winning: “I love seeing my body so tired that I think it would be impossible to put it through that again tomorrow and then seeing it recover.” Sammi pauses. “When I had my accident, I watched my legs atrophy to nothing, so to watch another part of my body get stronger and look after the rest of it is reassuring. I appreciate my body a lot more. I’ve seen it flourish in ways I never thought it would.”
Sammi practises hill sprints near her house in Nantwich and, on Saturdays, does a long push of 14 miles, her partner Conor cycling alongside. “I love training with people,” says Sammi, who goes out with her dad when she’s back at the farm. “That’s the one condition of being part of my life.”
Then there’s the sheer joy of whizzing along in a racing chair: “You almost feel as if you’re floating.” Downhill, Sammi can hit about 40 miles an hour: “I’ve always loved the adrenaline rush that comes with speed and that feeling of being free.” There’s a particularly steep hill near her parents’ house that she’s loved since the early days: “Going down it is really fun, but my dad’s rule is if you want to go down it, you have to push up it.”
Wheelchair racing might be Sammi’s main job, but others know her from Countryfile, where she’s been a presenter for the past year. “Because I haven’t always wanted to be a sportsperson, I sometimes fight with that identity a bit,” says Sammi. “Farming and the countryside make up the other side of me.” One day, she hopes to have a smallholding.
Sammi feels less pressure filming for TV than she does racing: “When you’re the presenter, you’re not the important person.” The break from training also helps her concentrate when she returns, although she usually takes her racing chair with. Sammi has presented segments on accessible walks in Dartmoor, lifeboats in Somerset and bees at RHS Garden Wisley. “I love speaking to people and I love learning things,” she says.
The programme she enjoyed making most was a lambing special with her dad. “That’s me and my dad’s thing,” says Sammi. “My safe space is in the lambing shed.”
As a child, Neil would trust Sammi to do a night shift at lambing time so he could get some sleep. “That’s when I could shine. I still have to deliver one sheep a year or my dad says I’ll lose the talent,” Sammi says with a laugh. She daren’t miss a season to find out.
The Paralympics runs from 28 August to 8 September. Watch the Games on Channel 4 or listen to coverage on BBC Radio 5 Live.
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