Just two years after winning a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, 28-year-old Stephanie Inglis was in a devastating accident, Now she’s planning to return to comeptitive judo.
Inglis’s story sounds like the script of a Hollywood movie, which in time it may be. In May 2016, when she had opted out of the Rio Olympic Qualifiers to take a sabbatical from Judo and teach English as a foreign language in Ha Long, Vietnam. One fateful day she got on a motorbike taxi to take her home from work when skirt got caught in the wheel, pulling her off the motorcycle. Initially she was abandoned by the driver at the side of the road, and was only transported to the hospital by strangers.
She was put in an induced coma, while her friend Khalid Gehlan set up a GoFundMe page to raise funds for her recovery. Many in the Scottish judo community aided in raising over £300,000 to finance her treatment.
"I would like there to be a film of my life, I would definitely do that," Inglis told Herald Sport. "I will play myself! Maybe I could write a book too. I think it would be important to get my story out there. If anything, just to prevent something like this happening to anybody else in the future. Not that I did anything daft – I did what I was told. It was just a freak accident.
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"I had a one per cent chance of survival at the start of it," she added. "All the odds were against me. Even the doctors back home now are saying ‘why are you here?’ It is a miracle, just crazy, that I am alive."
Having been told that the conditioning work which she put in as she pursued her judo career might just have saved her life, Inglis is currently targeting a return to the Scotland team for the Tokyo games in 2022.
That is quite a stretch considering that she still awaits one extensive piece of surgery to get a titanium plate inserted to replace one side of her skull.
"I would like to return to competitive judo – I think I owe it to myself," said Inglis.
Original story: http://www.judoinside.com/news/1750/Stephanie_Inglis_thinks_about_competitive_judo_again