One Step Ahead

In just one year Catriona Williams and her CatWalk Trust have banked half a million dollars to fund research into reversing spinal cord injury.

Words: Kate Coughlan  Photographs: Nicola Edmonds

Catriona with Double O'Kay, half sister to
winners Perfect World and Cent from Heaven.

Keeping up with Catriona Williams, as she whirls about her home and Wairarapa farm, takes some doing. She tackles life from her wheelchair in exactly the same way she tackled the monumental jumps of her international equestrian career: full-on, fearless and having fun.

This is why she reached the top in New Zealand’s equestrian world: a Grand Prix showjumper, a three-day eventer at four-star level who represented New Zealand in both, who competed horses in almost a dozen countries including Badminton (15th) and the Open European Championships (15th).

This is how she, and her team of CatWalk Trust members, have blazed a trail into the hearts of thousands of New Zealanders and prised open their wallets to establish a massive fund almost overnight. In the world of charity fund-raising, banking half a million in a year is an extraordinary achievement. A charity dinner and auction organized by Catriona and her friends in Auckland last year raised $400,000. "We still pinch ourselves over that event; we still can’t believe it happened." The CatWalk Trust team pulled off a coup that not only involved royalty (Zara Phillips is CatWalk Trust’s international patron) but also attracted most of New Zealand’s wealthiest and most generous families as well as harnessing significant and ongoing corporate support.

Within a year of its establishment, CatWalk Trust is already meeting its target of supporting research into reversing spinal injury. In the first round of grants, $50,000 has been given to Dr Simon O’Carroll at Auckland University and Dr Tim Woodfield of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Christchurch University. Catriona’s goal is to find a cure.

"I want to dance again. I want to be part of Dancing with the Stars," she says, as beautiful and charismatic as ever, but for a fleeting moment the irrepressibly positive Catriona is devastatingly sad. "This is a life sentence, spinal cord injury. If I’d robbed a bank I’d do my time in jail and be released. I am never going to be released from this if we don’t find a cure."

The moment passes and she wheels her battery-assisted chair in a flying pirouette and is serving pumpkin soup, heating bread and showing NZ Life & Leisure how she designed her new kitchen to be fully workable without looking like a kitchen for the disabled. All this, plus conversation, at 100kph.

Self-pity isn’t a currency she trades in. At fund-raising events Catriona talks about her accident, her injuries and her life. Such is the X-factor of this woman, the tears come not from pity but from admiration and the recognition that few of us would have the courage to tackle life with her humour and refusal of acceptance.

"When this [the accident that caused her tetraplegia] first happened my girlfriends rallied and wanted to help me. They set up a fund and to start with we were going to raise money to provide support to paraplegics and tetraplegics." As they discussed how to use the money, Catriona says it suddenly dawned on her: "It would be nice to have things that help disabled people, but the thing we most want is to not be in wheelchairs. We want to walk."

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