Stephanie Inglis thinks about competitive judo again

Likely none of us have a more startling backstory than Stephanie Inglis. Two years after she was collecting a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, this 28-year-old judoka from the Highlands knows she is simply fortunate still to be able to tell the tale. Yesterday she was happy to celebrate her birthday.

Inglis's story reads like the plot for a book or a Hollywood movie. In time it may be both. It was back in May 2016, when she was opted out of the Rio qualification process to take a sabbatical from her sport teaching English as a foreign language in Ha Long, Vietnam, that she got on a motorbike taxi to take her home from work. Her skirt got caught in the wheel, pulling her off the motorcycle.

But her ordeal wasn't over there. At first she was abandoned by the driver at the side of the road, relying on the kindness of two random strangers to transport her to hospital.

Then, when it emerged that the correct travel insurance was not in place, her friend Khalid Gehlan set up a GoFundMe page to raise funds online, and the Scottish judo community and some other random strangers raised north of £300,000 to finance her treatment.

When she finally came round from an induced coma, with her parents Robert and Alison at her bedside, with no knowledge of the entire incident, rest assured there was quite a scrapbook available to fill in the blanks.

"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.

"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."

The story may yet have the Hollywood ending. Having been told that the conditioning work which she put in as she pursued her judo career might just have saved her life, now Inglis is targeting a return to the Scotland team for Tokyo in 2022, the next time when the martial art will be back on the games schedule.

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, and must still be chaperoned in everything she does by her mother, father or sister.

This will be a long road back and no mistake - so consequently this business studies graduate has lined up a full-time job as a trainee manager at a car rental firm in the Highlands.

"I would like to return to competitive judo - I think I owe it to myself," said Inglis.

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