Natalie du Toit

Natalie du Toit grew up in Cape Town and was swimming competitively from a young age, close to making the South African team for the 2000 Olympics as a teenager. In February 2001, riding her scooter home from morning training, she was hit by a car. Her left leg was amputated at the knee.

She was back in the water within three months, before she had even been fitted with a prosthetic leg, initially just to stop thinking. Her times were, unsurprisingly, slower. What was surprising was how quickly they came down. At the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, barely 18 months after the accident, she won two gold medals in the multi-disability events and, extraordinarily, qualified for the final of the able-bodied 800 metres freestyle.

At the Athens Paralympics in 2004 she won five golds, and did the same in Beijing four years later. But it was the other Beijing race that made headlines. She had qualified outright for the Olympic 10 kilometre open water swim, becoming the first amputee to compete at the Olympics, and carried South Africa's flag at the opening ceremony. She finished 16th in a field of 25, a couple of minutes behind the winner, swimming without a prosthesis.

She won three more Paralympic golds in London in 2012 and retired with 13. She has said she never thought of herself as a disabled swimmer, only as a swimmer who happened to have one leg.