John Farrow hurtles towards recovery and the 2014 Sochi Olympics Skeleton racer John Farrow in training. Earlier this month, skeleton racer John Farrow and his teammates were on a train heading towards Sochi, the Russian venue for next February's Winter Olympics. The train's speed was 125kph. Every day I have negative thoughts running through my head. But I never want to give up on myself. "We all thought that was quick, but we do that everyday on the track," he says. I got my fastest speed in Whistler this year of 142kph. When it messes up at that speed, that's when you have to be really on your game. If you hit a wall at that speed, and it throws you off line, that's when people have to stay calm and relaxed. John Farrow at the AIS Indoor Track, the training camp for Australian skeleton athletes. Like the time in Italy when he hit the wall, the visor of his helmet blew off, and he was hurtling down the track with wind and ice in his face. "I'd advise against that," he offers. Hitting the wall is one thing. Keeping your chin up is another. Literally. At the world championships in 2011, he clipped his chin on a run. "Our chins are so close to the ice and our sleds, it just opened it enough to let all this blood out," Farrow recalls. I got to the end of the track and there was blood all over the track and my sled. Head down: John Farrow, Australia's skeleton hopeful at the Sochi Winter Olympics. Yet the mistake that mangled the 31-year-old's left knee, that left his foot dangling "like a droopy piece of meat," that prompted surgeons to replace crucial ligaments with those of dead people, that prompted specialists to tell him to forget about his Olympic pursuit and concentrate on walking, that haunts him almost every single day, wasn't at high speed. It happened on a tartan track while doing sprint training, travelling at almost zero kilometres per hour, when he tripped over his own feet. "Everyone expects the injury happened on the sled, but it was actually in 2011, when I was sprint training, two days out from beginning my first World Cup season," Farrow says. I was doing some accelerations, and I tried to pull up quite quick and I rolled my ankle. Which wouldn't have been a big deal, but I tried to stop the roll, and I twisted by leg, and my whole body weight went down on my knee and it went sideways. I knew something big had happened. I had all this pain shooting around my knee. It was like a long road to recovery from one simple trip. The damage done reads like something from a car crash. Rapid recovery: Winter Olympic hopeful John Farrow's leg was rebuilt with the hamstring and Achilles tendon from dead people. He ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament, lateral collateral ligament, damaged his posterior cruciate ligament, tore one of his hamstring muscles off the bone and fractured his tibia. The knee was slowly pieced back together, in stages. "My LCL was rebuilt with the hamstring of a dead person in the United States," he says. The ACL with the Achilles tendon of a dead person in Australia. Throughout that time, several specialists told him straight: "You should forget about the Games." But the worst damage wasn't the tortured knee as much as the stretched nerve that rendered his foot useless. "From the knee down, the nerve was stretched but it was enough to stop the signal," says Farrow, a former rugby league player from Blacktown who played junior reps for North Sydney and grew up wanting to play in the NRL. That meant the foot would just hang like a droopy piece of meat, because it had no muscle tension to the front of my leg. Sometimes they grow back, if the signal connects up again, and sometimes they don't. The hardest thing for me was keeping motivated, and keeping the drive, when you have no idea if it's going to heal. "Until I got little flickers in my toes, all the nerve doctors, all the physios, said, "It's a huge injury. You should just worry about just walking again instead of just doing this sport."" Others were more positive. John Marsden, the sports scientist coordinator at the NSW Institute of Sport, was critical. Says Farrow: "He has taken me from a completely destroyed knee in January 2012 right up until now. Through all my foot paralysis, he has stayed positive and continually motivated to never give up. With the aid of a carbon fibre brace on his foot, Farrow slowly returned to training, limping his way on to the sled at the start of his run. He returned to international competition in November last year at the Intercontinental Cup in Whistler, and eventually qualified for the world championships at St Moritz in Switzerland in January. He now intends to press for medals at Sochi. It's a comeback of biblical proportions, and it's why he is the leading contender for the Ian Thorpe Outstanding Achievement award - which recognises athletes who have triumphed over adversity - at the NSWIS awards in Sydney on Thursday night. Ask Farrow if he ever thought of walking away, he replies: "Every day those thoughts go through your head. This isn't club football. I'm up against Olympic athletes who have been training 10 years of their life to be the best. I'm trying to compete against them and I've got a distinct disadvantage at the start. I have to drive my way back into the times - from three tenths [of a second] down at the start, which is a huge margin. If I can get my start back, I can be competing for medals. And what of that moment in time, when it almost ended? Ever think of that? "It runs through my head all the time," he laughs. I have a fear of tartan tracks and spikes. Sometimes I'll be warming up and slowing down and I get that image in my brain.