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“My ambition now is the same as it’s always been: get faster,” says Sammi Kinghorn. “I still feel I can. I know there’s little changes in technology I can use, other things I need maybe to look at. The day when you don’t think you can get any faster is the day you say: ‘OK, I’m done.’”
Kinghorn, for most people, is rapid enough already. The fastest British female wheelchair racer in history, the 28-year-old is now a deserved Paralympic champion too, setting a Games record as she won gold in the T53 100m this summer. It was one of five medals she brought home from Paris, making her perhaps the standout British success, but, she says, her breakthrough came about in part by learning to step away from the fierce ambition that drives her.
“I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself thinking I had to win a medal to be anything or to do anything,” she says. “But after Tokyo [the Paralympic Games held in 2021], I learned that people forget about the medals after a few weeks. The important part is the journey and the actual memories you make during the Games, because they’re the things that stay with you. So my favourite in Paris was the moment I crossed the line, because I could look up and see my friends and family.”
Kinghorn had discussed the desire to change her approach with her family before setting out. “I said to my dad before I went to Paris: ‘I think I’m OK if I never win gold.’ It’s quite a hard statement for an athlete to make but I wanted to come to peace with it, just in case it didn’t happen, because it’s so much pressure to load on yourself.”
Her relationship with her father, a farmer in the Scottish borders, has endured through the most challenging circumstances. Kinghorn lost the use of her legs as a teenager after a playful attempt to assist her father in the snow ended with her being crushed by the jaws of his forklift truck. Both blamed themselves for the tragedy, but their love for the other never wavered. It was his words about competition that she kept with her in Paris, despite her anxiety.
“I’d said to him that if I didn’t win, I didn’t want to not be proud of what I had achieved or to feel like I had missed out,” she says. “He said: ‘I would love to see you in gold.’ So after I had won I went round and I told him he’d got to see me in gold. That moment for me was indescribable.”
Kinghorn says her happy memories of Paris are many and lingering: from whiling away the spare hours with teammates playing Monopoly Deal (“It makes me smile whenever I think about it”), to the thrill of competing in full stadiums, something para-athletes know not to take for granted. The empty pandemic venues of Tokyo were, for Kinghorn, “the worst feeling ever”. Paris gave her a true sense of what a major sporting event was like. “In Paris, we had days where it was at full capacity, 70,000 people and it was so loud,” she says of the Stade de France.
“I remember going out, looking up and thinking: ‘This is what it’s all about.’ There was a lot of buzz and I’ve had lots of people come up to me since, saying that they watched me or that the Paralympics were better than the Olympics, which just didn’t happen at any other Games. You always hear that if you do well, you’ll have so much work, you’ll be so busy when you finish. None of that really happened after Rio or after Tokyo, but after Paris it did.”
Like most other people involved in disability sport, the question of how to turn that post-Games buzz into something more permanent frustrates Kinghorn. “It shouldn’t just be every four years that people watch,” she says. “Most para-sports have world and European championships, but they’re not being televised, and most people don’t know when they’re on.”
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She also notes that the lack of visibility is not just down to broadcasters. At the time of our interview, the date and venue for the 2025 World Para Athletics Championships had yet to be agreed, with Delhi subsequently confirmed as host on 19 December. “Normally we would know exactly where that is and what’s happening,” she says. “We’ve been told that it’s going to be the end of the year, but it’s kind of strange not knowing what you’re training for.”
Fortunately for Kinghorn, she has enough to occupy her despite the uncertainty. As well as continuing her quest for speed, in 2025 she is also hoping to expand into marathon racing. Meanwhile her career as a broadcaster continues to blossom (her BBC Countryfile role has her “always on top of a hill and almost freezing, but I get to see and try so many incredible things”). One further activity comes before all that, however. In January she will be returning to the borders to marry her fiance, Callum Aitken, in Dunbar. “I’ve just been enjoying doing all the planning,” she says, “but while I was in Paris I left Callum a list of things that he had to do. They were strict instructions, and he did them all, so that was good.”
