KEY POINTS:
Johanna O'Connor's story reads like one of those 'against all the odds' biographies so loved by American television producers - yet meet her in person and you might fail to recognise that behind that big smile lies a spirit as strong as steel.
"She's gutsy all right and
as determined as all hell," says surf lifesaving legend Cory Hutchings. "A lot of people wouldn't have made it back."
What she came back from was one of those tragedies that life throws up; where only the strongest survive. In August 2003, O'Connor and her boyfriend Jared Selby were walking to a party in Hamilton when a distracted driver mounted the pavement and mowed them down.
Selby, a 22-year-old soldier, died from his injuries and O'Connor, then 20, was in a coma for 10 days.
She was left with a raft of injuries - a fractured skull, ligament and nerve damage to her legs, a dislocated and fractured shoulder, a broken right hand and a badly injured face. The doctors didn't give her much chance of returning to competitive sport. O'Connor knew otherwise.
"I thought 'I've lost everything in my life', so I just wanted to go out there and see what I could do," says O'Connor. Just eight months later, she was back representing New Zealand.
Training became her mechanism for coping with the emotional fallout. "It was the way I dealt with things," she admits. "To be able to go to sleep at night, I'd make myself so physically tired that, as soon as I laid down, I'd just go to sleep.
"It helped me put things to the back of my mind, to deal with it when I was ready to. When I finally sorted myself out, then I could deal with the other side of things."
Ironwoman, one of the events in which O'Connor competes, is an apt moniker. Aside from the actual event, there is the stuff we don't see; the things that go on the water, at the far side of the buoy, out of sight of the judges. Competitors often resort to dirty tactics to get ahead.
"We have a lot of fights; and your togs are nearly ripped off you; scratches all over you. It's all good fun," laughs O'Connor. "I'm not shy about giving it back."
If you're still thinking this is some sort of glamour sport, think again. The first weekend of the season has only recently passed but O'Connor had been in training since August.
"I can tell you that the water is very cold at that time of year."
While the chilly waters of Mt Maunganui are of little concern, the Aussies are. O'Connor won an impressive four silver medals at last year's world championships. But she clearly wants gold and to do that she'll need to beat Australia's finest.
"This year we're actually quite strong. We've just come away from the International Pool Challenge, which are held over two days and we won both of those," she says optimistically.
The win she really wants is at next year's world championships in Germany. The New Zealanders should be well prepared. Their preparations started some 14 months ahead of that June 2008 showdown.
Where the Aussies always hurt the Kiwis is with their strength in-depth. The Australian nationals are regarded as harder than most international events.
"There are a group of Northcliffe girls, from Australia, who just seem to vary the wins between them. If there is one of me here, then there will be eight of them in Australia. They've got the numbers. If someone gets injured they can replace them straight away."
But Hutchings is positive. "We won the world champs in 1998 when we probably weren't as favoured as the team we've got this time. They have to hit the Aussies first, where it hurts. They need to get on a roll from the start. Keep shooting bullets, mate. Eventually they'll fall over, but it takes a machine gun to do it. New Zealand are capable of knocking off the Australians," says the three-time World Ironman Champion.
Will O'Connor be more than just a silver bullet to the golden aspirations of the Aussies?
"Johanna is strong in anything from 200 metres up," says Hutchings. He is referring to O'Connor's favoured event, the 200m Super Lifesaver, which involves swimming 75m, picking up a mannequin and swimming 25m with it, grabbing fins and a tube for a 50m dash and clipping in the mannequin for the final 50m swim.
"Training with Clive Powers has probably given her that endurance. He's one of the hardest coaches I've swum under. That's probably a reason why she got through her tragedy.
"The mental strength that she had from applying herself in training gave her the will and the determination to fight. Sport certainly gives you a lot more than just winning a race, that's for sure."
