One sport wasn't enough for 76-year-old horse rider Sandra Atkins – she decided to do two, taking up indoor rowing for the first time in her life, and winning gold medals in both.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Three hip replacements and two knee replacements aside, the Deloraine woman limped into the local gym on a walking stick a few months ago and said she wanted to row at the Australian Masters Games.
“I’d already entered the showjumping and I was just scrolling down through the dozens of sports,” she said.
“No, I can’t run, I can’t jump, I can’t do this, can’t do that. Then I saw rowing, and I thought, no, I’ve only ever rowed a dinghy. But then I saw indoor rowing. Indoor rowing was a sport.”
So she started training twice a week with a Deloraine personal trainer in the lead-up to the competition.
“I looked up the Masters Games website to see what the time the winner in my age group had got the last time and that was my goal. If I could get somewhere around that then I wouldn’t make a fool of myself - that was the idea.”
Atkins’ first hip replacement was about 10 years ago, but she ended up with a dePuy hip, which started disintegrating a few years later.
“The cobalt was breaking down and was getting into people’s blood,” she said. “I was feeling crook and I was putting off calling the surgeon, as you do, because it was starting to get sore.
“I got a letter from him to say, ‘you’ve got one of these hips’, and it was just hitting the headlines that it was trouble. So I went to see him and he changed it a week later.
“If he’d have waited any longer, I’d have been in big trouble because there was white gunk around the hip and that was contaminating the muscle, so he had to cut that muscle away.
“It dislocated two days after he operated on it because there was nothing to keep it in and I had to wait six hours to go back into the theatre because it was busy. But he was able to manipulate it back in.”
That was about four years after the initial replacement. She then had her other hip and knee replaced by a different surgeon – Bernie Einoder. And then her final knee replacement was in September last year. Because a lot of muscle had been removed from her hip on that side, she was very lame.
“I can walk but when I went back to see Bernie Einoder to get the last knee done, because of the hip, he took one look at me wobbling into his surgery and he said, 'my girl, you are going to have to put your pride in your pocket and use a stick’.”
After her three indoor rowing wins earlier in the week, Atkins competed in the showjumping on Friday and Saturday, taking home two more gold medals and two silvers.
