As a little girl, Sammi Kinghorn was inseparable from her father Neill. Dressed in a tiny red boiler suit and mud-spattered wellies, she used to follow him around the farm in the Scottish Borders where Neill worked as a stockman.
By the age of ten she was manning the lambing shed, knew how to perform a caesarean on a ewe and dreamed of one day becoming a zoologist. ‘She was my little shadow,’ recalls Neill, 59, who still lives on the farm, near Gordon in Berwickshire, with his wife Elaine. ‘Her mum wanted to put her in dresses but Samantha just wanted to be outside, getting dirty and following me around.’
So when Neill was clearing snow drifts from the farm with a forklift truck on the afternoon of December 2, 2010, it was no surprise to find Sammi, then 14, and her best friend – who’d been snowed in for a week together and were relishing the time off school – nearby.
‘I remember Dad was quite overwhelmed,’ says Sammi today.
‘Animals were dying, people in the rural cottages couldn’t get out to go shopping and we didn’t know when the snow would stop.
‘My friend and I were sent out to clear the dog kennels. They’d run out of food, so we went back to the farm to get some.
‘Walking along one of the tracks with the wheelbarrow, Dad came up behind us in the forklift, beeping his horn and laughing. We were jumping around, annoying him.
‘My friend walked off to the side with the wheelbarrow and for some reason I decided to climb on to part of the forklift.
‘To this day, I have no idea why I did it. I suppose I thought it would be funny. There were some other kids out at the time and I was trying to show off. I remember looking at my friend and laughing.’
What happened next still haunts Neill and Sammi’s nightmares.
Not realising his daughter had climbed onto the lower part of the forklift, and unable to see her from the cab, Neill lowered the bucket – which he’d been using to shovel snow – down on top of her.
‘I remember feeling this pressure on my neck,’ says Sammi. ‘I started to laugh; I thought Dad was joking, that he’d gone a bit too far.
‘Then I started screaming. I felt my back popping and before I knew it my head was in my crotch. I was crushed right down into a tiny ball.’
She adds: ‘My heart was thumping in my chest. Everything felt really slow and all I could hear was my breath. I remember closing my eyes and thinking, ‘You’re going to die, and your Dad’s going to think it’s his fault.’
‘When I opened my eyes again, I shuffled forward. I couldn’t feel my legs but I could still move them. I slipped and fell on to a big pile of compacted snow.
‘I remember feeling all the muscles in my legs pulsing. They were twitching and then all of a sudden they stopped. That was the last time I ever felt my legs.’
Thirteen years have passed since then – and the Kinghorn family have been through hell and back coming to terms with what happened. But Sammi, now 27, has turned a devastating tragedy into a triumph neither she, nor her parents, could have dreamed of.
It’s testament to her extraordinary spirit and courage that she’s now a world champion wheelchair racer and double Paralympic medallist. In the past 12 months, she set a 100m record at the World Para Athletics Championships in Paris, was awarded an MBE for services to disability sport and secured a presenting job on BBC’s Countryfile, bringing her back to her rural roots.
And yet for years, because she feared opening old wounds for her father, she hid the truth about how she got her injuries.
Indeed, when Neill carried her into the kitchen after the accident, Sammi lied to her parents, too, telling them she’d tripped and fallen on some snow.
‘I was having a coffee with a friend,’ recalls Elaine, 55, a former carer who gave up her job after Sammi’s accident.
‘The back door burst open and Neill had Samantha in his arms. He laid her on the floor; she was in a lot of pain and calling for an ambulance. We thought she’d winded herself. Neill kept asking, ‘Did I hit you with the forklift?
‘ ‘Did you touch anything?’ And she said ‘No’. She just kept crying out in agony.’
Blue-lighted to hospital, Neill and Elaine arrived to find their daughter hooked up to machines, wires and breathing tubes.
‘Dad wouldn’t even look at me,’ says Sammi. ‘He kept staring at the ground. Mum was screaming and screaming: ‘My baby, my baby, we’re so sorry.’ They were both a mess. I was trying to keep them calm, saying, ‘It’s fine. I’ve got a plan. We’ll get through this.’
‘It wasn’t until the doctor came and spoke to me later that night that I knew I had to tell the truth.
The fractures in my vertebrae couldn’t have been caused by slipping over.’
Neill adds: ‘She tried to protect me from the start. It wasn’t until the next day, when she’d been airlifted to the spinal unit in Glasgow, that she told us she’d climbed onto the forklift.
‘I’d always taught her the dangers of farm machinery – that it can kill. I drummed that into her and her brother from a young age.
‘So she blamed herself. And I blamed myself. I was numb. And then I started to process it and think, ‘What the hell have I done?’ It blew our life to pieces.’ Incredibly, when doctors confirmed Sammi would never walk again, she, with great maturity, immediately started making plans.
‘I remember thinking, right, well, you’ve done this to yourself, so this is your consequence for doing something silly,’ she says.
‘At that time I thought I was going to be stuck in bed forever, so I thought maybe I’d do an online university course, or invent something to help people like me.’
A six-month hospital stay ensued, during which Neill and Elaine took it in turns to do the three-hour round trip to Glasgow twice a week, and Sammi’s brother Christopher, 31, took leave from the Army to be by her side.
‘It was frustrating seeing all my friends going to school and out to parties,’ she says. ‘I wanted to do those things, but instead I was stuck in hospital, learning to do things like pull up my trousers and get into bed. That was the hardest part.
‘But it wasn’t awful. I met a lot of lovely people, some in much worse places than me. I got into a routine of physio all day and tutoring at night. I got through it, with the help of my family.’
Back on the farm, however, Neill was struggling. He became depressed and suicidal.
‘I couldn’t help wondering what her life was going to be like,’ he says, his voice thick with emotion. ‘I wanted to take it back, to give her her legs back, but I couldn’t.’
‘I was worried about him,’ admits Elaine. ‘There’s no blame – that would never have crossed anyone’s mind – but it’s still hard to take away the guilt that he was involved.’ They credit their determined, upbeat daughter with being the ‘glue’ that stuck them all back together.
Sammi was delighted when she was able to regain some independence with her own wheelchair. With financial aid from Neill’s boss, on whose estate the family live, they moved into a larger, wheelchair-accessible farmhouse.
But when in 2011, her physio took her to watch the Inter Spinal Unit Games at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, a national event for patients with spinal cord injuries, Sammi had her eyes opened to a completely new life goal.
‘I saw a girl in a racing wheelchair and I was speechless,’ she recalls. ‘She was so strong, so fast and looked so cool. I was a teenager and all I wanted was to be cool, so this got me really excited.
‘She was faster than all the runners. It was amazing to watch. I knew then and there that was what I wanted to do.’ With help from their local community, the Kinghorns raised the £4,500 needed to buy Sammi a racing wheelchair with bright pink wheels — and she was off.
The training, on a specially-built treadmill in her parents’ garage and a track in Glasgow, was gruelling, but nothing could deter her.
In her very first event, the London Mini Marathon in 2012, Sammi came second.
‘As soon as the gun went, it was like peace in my head,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t hear anything going on around me. It was second nature – I just pushed and pushed to the finish line.’
It was the first of many accolades. She got herself a coach, started training twice a day, six days a week – and qualified for the Rio Paralympics in 2016, coming fifth in the T53 100m.
‘That flicked a switch in her brain,’ says Neill. ‘She realised that she could be on the podium — and she wanted to start winning.’
Sammi has since won two golds at the World Championships in 2017 and a gold and two silvers in July this year.
She also made it on to that Paralympic podium, with bronze and silver medals for ParalympicsGB in Tokyo in 2021 – and has her sights set on gold in Paris next summer.
Neill and Elaine couldn’t be more proud, and have been there for almost every race.
‘I cry at every medal she wins,’ Neill admits. ‘When I see her coming down the final straight, I get a lump in my throat. And when she crosses that line, I’m a mess.
‘Since the accident, I can’t hold back the tears. Even if we’re watching her on TV, I’m bawling. It means so much to see her doing something she loves, and doing it so well.’
In the early days, Elaine recalls, they bought a camper van to save on hotel bills, and they’ve since travelled the world – to Switzerland, Spain, Italy and Dubai, to support Sammi’s career. ‘She’s always been so determined,’ says Elaine. ‘She said to me right at the start: ‘I don’t want you to be my carer. I want you to be my mum.’
Though he’d do anything to go back and do things differently, Neill says the accident has brought him and Sammi closer.
‘I became a better father,’ he admits. ‘It completely changed my viewpoint on what’s important in life, and made me more open with my feelings.
‘I was too focused on my work before – that’s probably why Samantha and her brother followed me around the farm, so they got time with me.
‘It seems right that now I’m the one following her.’
Sammi hopes next year’s Games will further raise the profile of disability sport, which she fears has ‘lost momentum’ since the pandemic. ‘The prize money isn’t equal [to able-bodied competitions], and they still don’t include our races in TV coverage of major events, which is a real blow. I’ll keep fighting for that to change.’
Winning a Paralympic gold is still her dream, but friends and family matter more. ‘Being able to share my successes with the people I love is what makes me proud,’ she says.
‘Of course, winning feels great, but the cherry on top is seeing them after the race to celebrate.’
For now, Sammi has something even more exciting to focus on: a wedding.
Her boyfriend of five years, Callum Aitken, 28, an electrical engineer she met online, proposed last month during an African safari. He is, as Elaine puts it, ‘a really lovely boy — and Scottish, too.’
Together with Callum, with whom she lives in Nantwich, Cheshire, she’s planning a trip back to the family farm in a few weeks, as she does every year, to mark the anniversary of the accident.
Or, as she puts it, the start of her ‘new life’. ‘It’s not a day I ever want Mum and Dad to spend alone,’ she says.
‘It was such a scary thing to go through and we all still think about it, so we get together for a nice meal and a glass of champagne, and sit down and have a chat.’
Does she ever let herself think what might have been, had things turned out differently? ‘Of course I do. And of course I would take it back if I could; I’d do anything to take away the agony I felt, and the way it affected my parents.
‘But I like to think I still would have gone on to do something great with my life.
‘I didn’t plan it this way, but I wouldn’t change where I am now, or what I’ve done since that moment.
‘What happened taught me, and my whole family, that life can change in a minute.
‘You have to enjoy it while you can.’
Olivia Martin is a dedicated sports journalist based in the UK. With a passion for various athletic disciplines, she covers everything from major league championships to local sports events, delivering up-to-the-minute updates and in-depth analysis.
