Mum was ready to give up her leg to save mine

The memories of August 6, 2000 and what started off as ‘the best weekend of my life’ still play back vividly in Stef Reid’s head.

For a start there were arguments beforehand, as Stef, then 15, pleaded with her strict mother Carol to let her visit lakes in rural Canada with her best friends.

Later, having been allowed to go, Stef recalls with crystal clarity the thrill and excitement of racing along the water in a tube, being pulled by a speedboat.

‘You bounce along the waves and eventually you’re thrown into the water, as I was,’ she says. ‘I turned to wait for the speedboat to come back and collect me.’

However, in the final horrific seconds, Stef realised the driver of the boat hadn’t seen her in the water. And what happened next changed her life. ‘In a split second I realised he was heading straight for me – and my brain shifted into survival mode,’ says Stef, now 41.

‘I thought, “Stef, you need to avoid those propellers”, so I tried to dive under the surface to safety but I had a lifejacket on.’

‘I have this memory of darkness in the water and suspension in time. I was underwater and swam towards the light on the surface. I remember thinking, “Wow, that was really lucky, I won’t tell my Mum,” because I didn’t realise anything was wrong.

‘I couldn’t see my legs and after a few seconds I felt weird sensations. Shock, terror and panic set in.’

A lifeguard on the boat swam to support Stef in the water. When pulled back on board, she was bleeding profusely. The propeller had left deep gashes along her back and mangled her right foot. ‘I wanted to talk but I couldn’t get the words out,’ says Stef.Back on land, ‘my friends made a stretcher out of a deckchair and put me on the back of the van.

‘A neighbour who was a nurse sat beside me as we raced to meet the ambulance.’

Mum Carol, who is English and married to Scotsman Philip, arrived at the hospital. As surgeons began to discuss a possible amputation, she pleaded with them to remove her own healthy foot and graft it on to Stef’s mangled limb.

‘I’ll never forget my mum begging the surgeon, “Can you amputate my leg and give it to Stef?”,’ she says. ‘And after all those years of teenage arguments and disagreements
I learned in that moment that my mum put me first in everything.’

‘All those times as a teenager when 
I was angry with her because she was too strict, I realised she just wanted me to be safe.

‘I never fought with her again. I realised she loved me so much, she would sacrifice her own leg to help me. It made me realise how lucky 
I was.’

Stef remained in hospital for three weeks, with Carol, now 71 and a retired bookkeeper, sleeping on a chair beside her bed. The teenager had to face the reality that her dreams of becoming a professional rugby player were in tatters.

‘I was angry, miserable and in pain,’ she says. ‘I had to accept that sport wasn’t going to be part of my life and threw myself into my studies instead.’

Stef returned to school with hopes of becoming a surgeon. Two years later she was given her first running blade. While studying biochemistry at Queen’s University in Ontario, she asked to join the running team.

‘I wondered just how fast I could go,’ she says, and soon Stef was running alongside the non-disabled team. She was invited to run in Manchester at the age of 22 and paused her academic studies to train for the Paralympics as a long-jumper and sprinter.

The gamble paid off. Stef won a bronze medal in the 200m at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing when representing Canada, and silver in the long jump at the London 2012 Paralympics for Great Britain.

With her British parentage, Stef moved to the UK full time in 2011 to live and train in Leicester, turning to inspirational speaking and broadcasting after retiring from athletics in 2022.

Behind each of Stef’s successes has been Carol, her biggest cheerleader.

Stef now lives in Loughborough with husband Brent Lakatos, a Canadian wheelchair racer.

‘Mum gave up her weekends to drive me to competitions and she was always in the crowd shouting “Go, Stef, go!”’ says Stef, whose success extended beyond the track to include appearances on TV shows Celebrity MasterChef and Dancing on Ice, where she made it to the quarter finals.

Which of those two was the most nerve-wracking? ‘The scariest was Dancing on Ice,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t a natural skater and it was so nerve-wracking because I’d have an epic fall in every final practice, which made the live skate on television so much worse hours later.

‘My legs used to feel like jelly but I realised I could still function under all that stress.

‘Celebrity MasterChef in 2018 was wildly different because I had very little experience of cooking and 
I misunderstood the show.

‘I thought I’d be mentored and taught in every episode. When I realised there was no training involved, I ended up watching YouTube for hours every day, learning how to cook.

‘The skills never left me and now
I can at least throw a fantastic dinner party!’

Next up, Stef is presenting TV coverage of the Winter Paralympics in Italy – which begin this Friday – from a studio in Toronto. She is also a diversity ambassador for British Ice Skating, an inspirational speaker and a high-performance coach.

‘My best advice is just go for it,’ she says. ‘My life could have been wrecked when I was 15 but I would never have achieved what I have without losing my foot – or without my amazing mother helping me every inch of 
the way.’

Stef Reid recently launched the Hail Mary Friday Club for those looking for a gentle shove to live with more boldness and joy. Visit stefreid.com

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