Georgie Brayshaw: The Yorkshirewoman who was paralysed at 15 who now stands on brink of GB's Olympic rowing squad

Back then, Brayshaw was a bright-as-a-button teenager who loved riding horses. Her world was turned upside down one day when she suffered an accident which resulted in a serious head injury that left her paralysed down her left side and in a coma for over a week. The prognosis was so grim that her parents were told their daughter may never walk or feed herself again.

But the doctors weren’t counting on Brayshaw’s remarkable spirit and determination to not only walk again but take herself to the pinnacle of her sport and into contention to win a gold medal in Paris this summer.

For Brayshaw of Leeds, who is now 30, is a world and European champion in rowing’s quadruple sculls with her Great Britain team-mates and on course to challenge for her sport’s greatest prize in Paris this Olympic summer.

“Sometimes when I’m in the pits, when everything feels hard and my training is difficult, I’m really tired or I’m in a race, I will always think back to when I was 15,” she says. “I was in a coma and I was paralysed – and look at me now.

“If I can get out of that situation…if I can get to where I am today, then I can finish this race, or I can finish this training session because it’s not going to kill me. I’ve been through a lot worse.

“I use it as a motivation now that I can do anything that I want to do.”

It took her a year of rehab and physiotherapy to get back to feeling like a teenager again but even now – after all she has achieved in her chosen sport – Brayshaw cannot answer the question of whether she has made a full recovery. “I think I’m as recovered as I’m going to get,” she offers. “It happened at a pivotal point in my life. Who I may have been had the accident not happened is unknown, I am just me now.

“I have a bad memory. Is that from the accident? I don’t know, but I’m happy with where I am.”

It took her a few years to find out that rowing towards an Olympic destiny would become the event in her life that would define her, not a horse riding accident.

Brayshaw dabbled in rowing as something to do with friends in her second year of studying at the University of Northampton. But she ended it abruptly in her final year when another of life’s challenges interjected. “My mum had a stroke, and nothing is more important than my mum,” says Brayshaw.

After returning home to Pool in Wharfedale to help her mum back to health, it was her dad who suggested she pick up the oars again.

“Once I finished university I thought you know what, I’m pretty good at rowing, so I tried out for the GB start-Up programme,” says Brayshaw, who had joined Leeds Rowing Club. “I’d actually tried getting onto the Start-Up programme in my second year of uni only to realise I was a long way off the others.”

It was a case of second-time lucky though for Brayshaw who, by now 22, was commuting from Leeds to Manchester to take her place on the GB programme.

She moved to York when the Yorkshire section opened up, indebted throughout to the unwavering support of her parents.

“I’ll be forever grateful to my mum and dad,” she says. “When I first started on this rowing journey I wasn’t paid a penny, but they really believed in me, they got me a car, let me live at home, they’ve really enabled me to do this. From being told I may never walk or feed myself again, to then watching me get onto the GB Start-Up programme, it must have been unbelievable for them. They were like we’re going to support you no matter what, it was a little bit like a second chance at life.

“Especially with my mum’s stroke, she was only 53 at the time, it made them think life is short, you’ve got to go for it.”

Brayshaw moved to the prestigious Leander Rowing Club at Henley, working as a nanny, an au pair and sometimes a dog walker to make ends meet before she finally made it onto the Great Britain squad proper, based at Caversham in Berkshire.

Through it all, she was fighting a constant battle with her body.

“I’d recovered as a human being, but when I started rowing I hadn’t recovered as a high-performance athlete,” she says. “A lot of the connections in my body that you need for high-performance sport were broken. I had to do a lot of extra training to rebuild those connections, make myself a little bit more equal on both sides because I had a very strong side and a very weak side because I’d been paralysed.

“So I did have to do some extra work in comparison to my other team-mates, and even now I am a little bit unequal, but am I that way because of the accident or is that just the way my body is? I don’t know. I am who I am now, I’m happy with that. Every person has little things to work on.”

In the boat, does she have to over-compensate?

“I have to push a bit harder on certain sides or it might feel a little funny on one hand or a little bit different. It’s something I’ve worked to get used to.”

It has certainly not held her back. She was part of the British squad leading up to the last Olympics in Tokyo.

“Seeing everyone else excited to be going to Tokyo gave me a greater drive and I wanted a piece of it,” adds Brayshaw.

A more embracing environment in the Great Britain squad has brought the best out of Brayshaw and together with Hannah Scott, Lola Anderson and Lauren Henry – the latter who was added last April – the women’s quadruple sculls crew has become an inseparable quartet.

They won world championship gold last September and added the European title last month. Her three crewmates will all be guests at her wedding at Robin Hood’s Bay next year, but before then they have the small matter of a World Cup regatta next week and then the Olympics, provided Brayshaw is selected.

That appears a formality, but the Yorkshirewoman is taking nothing for granted.

“It would be an absolute dream,” she says. “When I was growing up in Leeds, even when I was at university, I was never really mad into sport. I’d watch the Olympics if it was on the TV.

“I was horse crazy and when I did watch the Olympics I just thought I’d never be able to do that. But here I am. I find it unbelievable that I’m here doing this, I have to literally pinch myself that this is me, this is real life. It’s really cool.”