Kelly Cartwright at the IPC Athletics World Championships in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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The Australian pin-up will go into London 2012 as a double world champion after a sensational performance at the 2011 IPC Athletics World Championships where she claimed gold in the Long Jump and 100m T42 events.
Cartwright only took up Athletics in 2006 after losing her right leg to cancer aged 15, and her progress since then has been nothing short of meteoric.
Her first major international event was the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games. She finished sixth (18.92) in the 100m but describes the experience of pulling on the Australian vest and competing in front of 90,000 people in the Birds Nest stadium as her most memorable yet.
Since Beijing, Cartwright has rapidly improved and matured as an athlete.
At the 2011 IPC Athletics World Championships, she won a thrilling Long Jump competition by setting a new world record of 4.19m, an improvement of 7cm on the previous best.
She followed this up with victory in the 100m. Her winning time of 16.46 seconds, knocked half a second off the Championship record, but was still 0.08 seconds off her personal best set in 2009.
What her performance did highlight though is that if she goes into London in good form then fellow Australian Michelle Errichiello’s 100m world record of 16.31 seconds, set in April 2010 could be in serious jeopardy.
It is not just her performances on the track though that have been getting Cartwright noticed.
She is an ambassadors for the Make-A-Wish foundation, a charity set up to enrich the lives of seriously ill children, and in 2009 she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa and fourth tallest in the world, for the Humpty Dumpty Foundation, a charity that supports children's hospitals in Australia and East Timor.
In August 2011 to mark ‘One Year to Go’ until London 2012, British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror featured Cartwright in its ‘Top 10 Paralympic Pin-ups’.
By the time of London 2012, Cartwright will be 23 years old and certainly one to watch both on and off the track.
