Dirt bike rider and Instagrammer Christina Vithoulkas on how becoming a paraplegic made her a stronger, happier person

She knew the risks of her thrill-seeking sport, but SA dirt bike rider Christina Vithoulkas has no regrets about the misjudged jump that left her in a wheelchair for life.

Appearances can be deceiving, says Christina Vithoulkas, who is a case in point. Here she is, mid-twenties, one of South Australia’s most followed influencers, generously tattooed and regularly pictured posing for selfies, perhaps in her underwear, often in delightful holiday locations.

Maybe you’ve got an opinion already. Huh! One of those self-obsessed empty-heads in it for the likes, endorsement fees and freebies.

Well, remember what she said. What you’ll never see in the Instagram selfies – not since September 2018 at least – is the 26 year-old on her feet. That’s because she became a paraplegic when a jump on her dirt bike went horribly wrong.

The other thing you won’t see is Vithoulkas looking sorry for herself. And that is because, despite the loss of feeling and movement below her chest, she doesn’t accept that her life is worse. What you do see, though, is more than you may ever want to know about the nitty-gritty of what it is like to be disabled.

Former motocross rider Christina Vithoulkas ended up a paraplegic after a crash, but isn’t letting disability slow her down. Picture: Simon Cross

“My epiphany moment was when I woke up after surgery,” she says of the aftermath of the accident. Her family was around her, devastated, crying. She gave them a rocket. “Come on guys, am I gonna be the backbone for this family? My back’s broken!”

But she says she knew they were reacting as they’d been told they should. “Everyone in the world has been conditioned to think the way they do,” she muses. “We like certain things, we do not like certain things, we get mad at certain things, because of the way the world conditioned us to think.

“And I remember saying to myself: what everyone’s upset about is because they think disability is a bad thing. And I said, ‘I’m not gonna make it a bad thing. I’m gonna make it the best thing that ever happened to me’.”

And, she says, it really was.

Christina Vithoulkas in hospital after her 2018 accident.

Vithoulkas grew up on a small vineyard in Barmera in the Riverland with mum Maria and dad Jim. Her father, she says, had hoped for sons to help with the grapes. Instead he got twin girls, Christina and Irene. “When he had us, he had that little bit of disappointment … but now he’s just like, ‘I’ve got the blokiest girls ever’,” Vithoulkas laughs.

What she means is that she and Irene are thrill seekers who grew up loving the outdoors. While as kids they never rode dirt bikes on the family property, one of their favourite after-school pastimes was to jump on the vineyard’s quad bike.

“We lived on the highway,” she says. “So we would come around the corner of the block, wait until a semi went past, and just drag them. I don’t know what’s with us – we’re adrenaline junkies.”

Irene was first on a bike, when they were 19. “My sister started dating someone that had a dirt bike, and then she got a dirt bike, a little Suzuki. And then I got a boyfriend with a dirt bike … As soon as I got on the back, I bought a bike within a month.”

It was love at first ride, although she wasn’t very good to begin with. But “I’m very stubborn,” she says, and was determined to get better. “I lived and breathed it. I would ride three times a week, sacrifice my weekends and studies. Riding just took over my life.”

But with thrills, usually come spills. Vithoulkas raced in motocross competitions but also wanted to test herself in freestyle motocross, an individual event where riders at her level accelerate up a metal ramp, jump a 55ft gap (17.7m), and land on a dirt ramp. The professionals jump 75ft (22.8m), and do stunts while airborne, but Vithoulkas was still learning and the most she did were “no-footers”, lifting her feet from the machine in the air.

“I was just doing it for fun, and it was a genuine adrenaline rush,” she says. It was dangerous, though. Crashes were part of the experience. But just how risky the sport could be, and how fine the margins were between success and failure, a bruise or something life-threatening, was brought home one day in a jump at Nuriootpa in 2017.

Christina Vithoulkas in action before her motocross accident, jumping from the ramp to dirt mound.

“So that one, I was practising all day,” she recalls. She’d been doing well, with the bike hitting the right spot all the time “perfect and fine”. But the next day she realised that all the practice had worn a channel on the run up, and she decided to fill it in and put a mat on top.

“That was just a brain fart of mine,” she says. “I didn’t calculate the traction I was going to get from the mat compared with the day before. So I went the same speed I was doing the day before, but now that my tyre had traction, it flew me a lot further, and actually I just freaked out because the bike nosedived.”

There is a video on her Instagram page of the crash in slow motion. “I made a mistake of letting go (of the handlebars). Normally, if you don’t let go of the bike, your feet and your arms are hopefully soaking the force – but because I had let go (there was) nothing, just my body on the bike. And that’s how I compressed my T6 vertebrae.”

It wasn’t crippling, but it was not far off. “That actually scared me from hitting ramps for nearly a year,” she admits. It came at a dark time for her, she says, the lowest point of her life. She was in a relationship which she says was deeply stressful and the riding had been an escape.

“And I realised that what I needed was to get back on the bike to make me happy,” she says. “That’s why I don’t regret what I did, because getting back on the bike was the best thing for me to get out of that rut.”

Her father was concerned. “My dad and I actually had this conversation about being paralysed – you know, ‘what happens if you end up in a wheelchair?’. And I was like, I’m not going to regret it. I’m doing exactly what I want to do; this is what makes me happy. And to this day I still have that same attitude. I do not regret anything, not even the day I went riding …”

The last day she went riding, back in September 2018.

Vithoulkas before her accident.

It was supposed to be a fun day back in the Riverland, with Irene and some friends. Vithoulkas had been living in Victoria, working as supervisor of a traffic control crew at Shepparton, and living with her then-boyfriend (and later fiance) and his parents.

It was a new jump, in a new park in Morgan, and she’d never been on it before. On her first run on her Kawasaki 450, it all went wrong. Accelerating up the ramp she says she was a little slow, and after soaring across the 55ft space, missed her mark.

What happened next was a shock. She’d done that kind of jump many times, even landed in situations like that, yet not crashed. The bike would just bounce and she’d ride out of it.

But this new jump was sharper and steeper than she was used to. “So it was my misjudgment,” she says. “I came up a little short, hit the top of the table top, and my legs were thrown up in the air.” Off the bike, she landed on her head, and the force of the impact snapped her spine over so that, scorpion-like, her backside hit her skull. She was unconscious for about five minutes. Irene and some friends were watching, horrified.

“I knew instantly I’d been paralysed,” Vithoulkas says of her first thoughts when she came to. After escaping serious injury before, “I knew I’d done a good job of it this time. I wasn’t quite, like scared or anything. I just knew my life had completely changed.”

She was three days in intensive care with fractured ribs, a torn spleen, fractured skull, a neck fracture and various other injuries. She had 12 screws and two rods placed in her back. But the injury, a permanently damaged T5 vertebrae in the middle of her back, left her a paraplegic, unable to walk but with use of her arms. Transferred to Victoria’s Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre, she was determined to be their speediest patient ever. Someone had left after two months, she was told. Vithoulkas was gone in seven and a half weeks.

Christina with her twin sister Irene after the accident.

Irene giving Christina a piggy-back in central Australia.

There’s obviously a lot Vithoulkas cannot do. And if you want the details on what they are, and how she overcomes them, she discusses everything from sex to toileting on her Instagram page. The decision to be open started in her hospital bed. Fascinated with what she was learning about her condition, she figured others would be, too. And, she says, the more honest she is, the more comfortable her viewers are.

“I want to normalise disability,” she says. “I wanted people to know, ‘hey this is the stuff I do to survive’.” More than that, she says she hopes her openness helps people to understand the experiences of their disabled friends, who may not be so forthcoming.

But there’s also a lot she can do. This day, sitting in a park in North Adelaide, she’s taking a break after driving from Barmera on the way to the airport for a Queensland holiday and photo shoot with an underwear company, Knobby.

Some of the photos will end up on her Instagram page, which has more than 35,000 followers. Back in May, The Advertiser ranked her as one of South Australia’s best up-and-coming Instagrammers.

Vithoulkas is still supported after her accident by Knobby, an underwear company she promotes on Instagram.

Before her accident she had 12,000 followers, but its grown strongly since. “I don’t think many people get an opportunity to have someone in ICU sharing Instagram stories of what’s happening with their urine. I think everyone just jumped on board to watch an inside view of what it’s like to be recently paralysed.”

She says when she was in hospital she looked online for someone to inspire her. “And when I was sitting there after my injury I was like, ‘I want to be the person that a recently disabled kid will look at: Google Christina, and see what you can do’.” She says she loves giving other newly disabled people tips on solving problems before they have to figure it out themselves.

She’s unfiltered and her posts about her condition can be confronting – for example, even her phone resting on her bare thighs can burn her – but there’s usually a joke to lighten the tone. On one picture posted from the Northern Territory, she sits on a stony creek bed, her wheelchair behind, with the caption: “Lucky I can’t feel my butt because I’m sure as hell one of those rocks was poking up my ass”.

Apart from her routine daily challenges, Vithoulkas says she now knows there are still big problems in the community for the disabled. So many hotels claiming to be disability-friendly have “just a few steps” or lack a bathroom railing or shower bench. Then there is filling up the car – she has to call ahead hoping the lone attendant will be prepared to operate the pump.

She pushes a better deal on her Instagram page. “I feel like this is my job. I just love the rewards. Not for me, but how it helps other people. It’s just like, makes it worth it for me. So I just put a lot into it.”

Christina Vithoulkas with dad Jim (L), mum Maria Rivera, stepdad Carlos Rivera and sister Irene.

She says she makes no money from promoting products. “I don’t want to sell things that I didn’t buy, or I’m only selling because I’m getting paid,” she says. “So I don’t make money. I’ve declined offers like that.” Knobby, she says, don’t pay but provide underwear.

Financially, she is in reasonable shape. Her insurance provides 80 per cent of her former income, and she lives at home rent-free in Barmera. That’s given her the means to buy her truck, a Ford Ranger, which she’s driven 40,000km across five states and the Northern Territory this past year.

The foot controls have been replaced by a brake stick she pushes with her hand, and the accelerator is run by a Bluetooth connection wrapped securely to her hand. To get her in and out, both front seats have been mechanised so they swing out and then drop down so Vithoulkas can, by herself, shift over from the wheelchair, then fold the chair for stowing before the seat takes her up and into the vehicle.

But the Ford doesn’t really have the adrenaline factor of her old dirt bike. That’s OK, though, because she has found something else that does: Vithoulkas is having a drift car built – which for the uninitiated, is a powerful sports car designed to spin its wheels, burn rubber, fishtail and “drift” sideways around corners on a bitumen track.

She’d hoped to somehow get back on the bike, but while she can ride, she can’t be competitive with able-bodied riders. Drifting, she thinks, will give her a level playing field with other competitors – as well as get her heart racing again.

On the first corner of her first ride in a drift car, “I instantly knew that the feeling I got … was the exact same feeling I got on the dirt bike,” she says. “With drifting, I don’t have any expectations. But I know even if I’m the worst one out there, I will not stop till I’m at a competing level. If that takes me five years I’ll keep on going.”

Vithoulkas is building a car and going to start drift racing. Here she gets a ride at The Bend Motorsport Park in Tailem Bend for Round 3 of Drifting SA. Picture: Simon Cross

Stubbornness is clearly a trait. It’s also helps maintain the positive attitude that sees her accident as a “blessing in disguise”.

“This was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because of the person I’ve turned into, the strength I’ve gained, the resilience, just everything about who I am right now,” Vithoulkas says.

“I loved that Christina before – she had a great life – I’m so glad I did what I did. But I want this Christina, this version of me. It’s just brought out the best in me and the way I live with my life and the way I go about my life. I don’t know how to explain it, I just live in a state of appreciation, to enjoy moments even more than I would before.”

Without the accident, she says she would probably have accepted a life that wasn’t as good as it could be. In a way she was paralysed mentally, unable to make changes, and the accident clarified her thinking.

“We service our cars every 10,000km, and I service my brain every week. What do I have to do this week to make me happier? What’s draining me, what’s not draining me.”

One thing draining her turned out to be meeting men. At the start she did go out, “meeting up with people to socialise, clubbing, sleeping with dudes.” Physically, she could still have an orgasm, although she says she has not.

“I’m like a reborn virgin now that I’ve gone two and a half years without it,” she says. “The longer I’ve gone on, the more energy I’ve realised it drained out of me – meeting the guy, having dinner. I feel better because instead of a wasted night with a dude, I go do something productive for myself.” That’s not to say she wouldn’t fall for the right man, she stresses. “But I’m not on the hunt for it.”

Vithoulkas says the better version of herself is when she’s with Irene or travelling – or both.

These days, she says the best version of herself is often when she’s with Irene, or travelling, or involved in her drift car plans. She’s also back with the people who’ve moulded her. Jim, who Vithoulkas says taught her to always see the cup half-full, quit a second job to make sure he was around home to help her. Irene, a FIFO worker at Roxby Downs, is also close at hand after she decided to decline a Sydney job in order to move back into the family home.

And while her mum, Maria, a deputy school principal, now lives with her own partner, she’s close at hand. It is Maria who Vithoulkas says taught her to be resilient. That’s a word, she says, she had to look up from her hospital bed. Yet she’s come to embody it.

“The only thing that gives me any sort of emotion, where I get upset about the accident, is when I hear my sister or my family talk about it,” she says. “It was a very traumatic experience for them, obviously, because they didn’t understand that I was going to be fine.”

As Vithoulkas says, appearances can be deceptive.

Vithoulkas, who is building a drfit car for racing, with similar cars to hers at Custom Imports in Lonsdale. Picture: Simon Cross