Catriona Williams is planning a month-long cycle tour through France this year – an extraordinary feat given that she is a tetraplegic in a wheelchair. She’s doing it to help fund research into spinal cord injury in the determined hope that she – and others like her – will one day walk again.
It happened just before Christmas on the 10th of November 2002.“You never forget your date,” she tells me. It was the day Catriona Williams, one of our most accomplished horsewomen and leading contender for the Olympics, fell from her mount and broke her neck.
“I knew it was a bit more serious than a collarbone because the pain was so severe.” Her striking blue eyes narrow at the memory. “My friends were beside me. I knew I was in trouble when I asked them to please put my legs on the ground.” She explains: “When you break your spine, your memory takes on the last position your legs were in, which was the jockey pose. My legs were already lying on the ground.”
The fall left her a tetraplegic. Catriona is paralysed from the base of her neck down. She has limited use of her arms and hands.
She insists on picking me up from the airport in Palmerston North. She looks so much younger than her 47 years. Her long blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, a simple white
T-shirt highlighting toned arms. She is beautiful, warm, enthusiastic and quick to laugh – the perfect person to front the charity she founded, The CatWalk Trust. The trust has raised more than $10million dollars for spinal cord research since it was founded in 2005.
Catriona has always been an energetic multitasker. “I was the one who drove the truck, talked on the phone while licking an ice-cream,” she laughs. Nothing much has changed. We chat as she manoeuvres effortlessly through the traffic, looking for a café and a park.
She drives herself to Palmerston North twice a week from her home in Wairarapa for “Gait Sessions” with physiologists at Massey University’s School of Sport, Exercise and Nutrition. The aim is to retrain her legs to walk again.
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