Janine Shepherd, a champion cross-country skier training for the 1988 Winter Olympics, was run over by a truck during a bike ride in the Blue Mountains. Among other injuries, her neck and back were broken in four places. Doctors warned her parents that she was not expected to survive her ordeal. Even if by some small chance she recovered, she would never walk again.

Coming to terms with her shattered Olympic dreams, refusing to believe what expert medical staff were telling her about her chances of any kind of recovery, Janine focused every sinew of her being on healing her broken body and crushed morale.

Her fighting spirit was rekindled watching small planes flying overhead. She made a decision, If I can’t walk, I’ll fly - and fly she did. Within a year she had her private pilot’s licence; twelve months later, her commercial licence; then her instructor’s permit.

While this was happening, she pushed her body to mend itself, forced her legs to walk again, step by painful step. Janine’s story Never Tell Me Never, of which a movie has been made, is a testament to the power of the human spirit. Her other books are Dare to Fly and Reaching For Stars.

Janine lives in Moss Vale with her husband and the three children doctors told her she’d never be able to have. She is a self-employed writer and speaker, who holds a Commercial Pilot Licence and is a fully qualified Aerobatics Instructor. She held the rank of Pilot Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force Reserves and was selected as one of the Junior Chamber International’s Outstanding Young Persons of the World, in the category of Personal Improvement and/or Achievement. This is an international program, with only 10 people being selected from a world-wide selection process. On 1st September 1998 she was appointed to the Board of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority for a three year term.