Media and Press

A New Way to Win
Ali Gripper, Sydney Morning Herald, 04 May 1998

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Tragedy shattered Janine Shepherd's dream of winning Olympic gold. But she is reaping greater rewards through her courageous efforts to rebuild her life, writes Ali Gripper.

ON a steep hill in the Blue Mountains: that's where Janine Shepherd's life took a big swerve, and never resumed the same course again. She was 24, an ace cross-country skier with Olympic dreams, pedalling furiously uphill on her racing bike when a truck knocked her down and just about killed her.

She never hesitates to tell people about this dramatic turning point, and how she overcame her horrific injuries and learnt to become a flying instructor. Her autobiography, Never Tell Me Never, published in 1984, was a classic in the survivor genre and became a bestseller. The telemovie inspired by it, starring Claudia Karvan tells of her journey to hell and back. The fact that Janine Shepherd is around to tell us about her darkest moments is just the start of her extraordinary story.

Anyone watching the ambulance arrive that day in the mountains, seeing her placed on the spinal board, would have thought she was a goner. She was thrashing about on the side of the road in pain and frothing at the mouth. Gashes down her torso and thighs had filled with road gravel and were bleeding profusely. Her forehead skin was pushed back, exposing the skull. Her eyes were rolling back inside her head. As she struggled through the first six months in the spinal unit of Prince Henry Hospital, the pain that her dreams of skiing were over was just as immense as the pain that gripped her battered body.

"Waking up in a spinal ward is every athlete's worst nightmare," Shepherd says. "Up until then, running was my coping mechanism. If I couldn't put on my shoes and head out the door, how was I going to get by?"

She had great trouble facing the fact that her injuries were permanent. Even when she did walk, it would be slowly, with a significant limp. She would never be able to run, and her back was held together by a rib taken from her left side.

"Then you think: what will I do with my life? How will I cope?" she says. "But you can and you do. And you learn that giving to others is a much more fulfilling life than Olympic medals."

Shepherd's voice is exceptionally clear and strong. She's pretty and impish, and it is impossible not to like her. Her pace is incredible: on, on, on, down the corridor of her rambling Avalon home with her seven-year-old daughter, Annabel, just as she is always moving on in her life - to the next project, the next book, the next motivational speech, perhaps interstate again.

She collaborated closely on the script of the film Never Tell Me Never with the producer, David Elfick, and has become close friends with the screenwriter, John Cundill, and actor Karvan during its creation.

"The chance to have your main character alive and on set or at the end of a telephone was an irresistible resource," she says. "They'd ring up constantly, saying, 'Janine, we're up to the hospital scene, what would you have said at this point? Or what would you have said here?'

SHE found the eight-week shoot slightly unnerving - Karvan wore her clothes, and personal possessions such as her skis and trophies were borrowed for the set. "It was a bit weird - it was like handing my life over to them," she says.

"Claudia was almost uncanny in her similarity to me - her colouring, her body definition, her mannerisms. When I saw the rushes I felt like I was watching myself."

For Karvan, too, there were some spooky moments, one of which was spending a night in a spinal ward to try to understand Shepherd's blackest moments. "The lack of privacy, the pain of it, the despair of others around me ... I had to go outside to recover. I couldn't last a whole night," she said. "It seems incredible to me that she spent six months like that. I just hope my performance does her justice."

The thing about Shepherd is that she radiates hope and determination, and she applies her never-say-die attitude not only to her own life, but to sharing it with others. "I'd never want my old life back again. I know that sounds like a big statement, but to be able to give what I can now to others is the most fulfilling thing.

"The Olympics are shortlived. Now I have the ability to give in a much greater way, to touch people, and that is far, far more rewarding," she says.

As well as being in great demand as a motivational speaker, she receives hundreds of letters every week; 20-page letters from paraplegics touched by her story, primary school students, people asking advice on writing a book, or learning how to fly.

"I can help people on a great scale because of my speaking ... there is a great amount of hope in knowing what I have survived ... but we can all do it in our own way, to give hope to others around us," she says.

There she goes again, winning you over. Never Tell Me Never is written with great reserves of feeling. Yet it's not only a page-turner, you keep wanting to flip over to the cover to look at her face as you read her story.

The disappointment of missing out on the Olympics took a long time to fade. "For an athlete there can be no greater loss than what I have been through. Learning to live with it, and make the most of it, has been the greatest challenge of my life," she wrote.

And there is some disappointment that it should have been made into a feature film but was not. "It was written for the big screen," said Janine. "It's very high production and I really wanted people to be able to watch it in a darkened room with no ads.

"But the funding came quickly and I don't think David [Elfick] wanted it to be like Shine where it takes 10 years to come out.

"But then I realised, the people who will get the most out of it are the ones who can't get to the theatre."

As she watches her third child, eight-month-old Angus, learn to crawl, she knows exactly how he feels. He'll fall many times in the learning process, but he'll always get up and try again. Like her, he doesn't know the meaning of giving up.

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