DANCING On Ice contender Stef Reid says the show has unleashed her sexy side – 22 years after she lost her foot in a boating accident.
The Paralympian spent much of her youth covering up her body, but wearing skimpy costumes on the ITV skating contest has seen her proudly showing it off like never before.
Superfit Stef, 37, sees it as the latest step on a journey in which she has learned to love herself — and show others with disabilities that they can do the same.
She said: “I spent years being embarrassed about having an artificial leg and always wearing trousers, never wanting to show it off.
“It was me thinking that being successful as a person with a disability was fooling everybody into thinking I don’t have one, whereas Dancing On Ice is the opposite.
“We’ve gone with a blade that doesn’t even have a skating boot. It’s saying, ‘yeah, you should stare at this because it’s awesome’, and I would stare at it too.
“I think that has probably been the most powerful thing for me — I guess just that whole journey of self-acceptance. I am never going to look like somebody on the cover of Vogue, and that’s fine, because I really like me.
“I like the person who I have become, and that accident and those scars and the amputation, that’s all part of it.
“I mean, from now on all of my competition uniforms are going to have to be bedazzled.
“Sometimes it’s fun to do something a bit sexier, to say there are more sides to me than perhaps people have seen. It’s just been awesome.”
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Stef was 15 when she suffered the catastrophic accident on a family holiday in Canada.
While playing in a lake she was thrown from an inflatable ring and then struck by a motor boat’s propeller, which cut into her back and right leg.
Medics could not save her foot, which had to be amputated.
Stef says she has struggled for years with body confidence, but Dancing On Ice isn’t just bringing out her sexier side — it’s getting her husband of 14 years, fellow Paralympian Brent Lakatos, hot under the collar too.
He has cheekily asked her to bring her costumes home to spice things up in the bedroom, and she said: “He’s loved it.
“He did tell me to hang on to the blonde wig after I skated as Baby from Dirty Dancing. I said, ‘I’m sorry, babe, I can’t’.
“But I always Zoom him before, send him a photo of me in my outfit, like, ‘hey, check me out’, and his response is always, ‘you look stunning. But I still prefer you without make-up’. How sweet is he?”
For the show, Stef — who was born to British parents in New Zealand before moving to Toronto in Canada — wears a special prosthetic leg fitted with a blade instead of a boot so she can compete on the ice with her pro skating partner Andy Buchanan.
Track and field champ Stef, who also has a degree in biochemistry, followed her sporting passion and represented Canada in the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing, then swapped allegiances to Team GB in 2010.
She went on to win back-to-back silver medals at the Games in London in 2012 and Rio in 2016.
Doing Dancing On Ice, she insists, has only enhanced her physical prowess too, as well as giving her new confidence.
Stef said: “I’ve discovered so much, like how to tame insanely wild nerves, and just do things I never thought was possible.
“I was telling Andy the other day that I scaled a 9ft fence because I just thought, ‘oh, this is fine. I can totally do it’.
“I was trying to get to a party and I was just tired of wandering around trying to find the entrance and I could see where I needed to be.
“I thought, ‘right, this is the most efficient way to do this. I suddenly feel like an acrobat. I’ll just go for it’. And I did. I feel like there’s literally no stopping me right now.”
As for the physical challenge of taking part in Dancing On Ice she said: “I absolutely love the training aspect of it.
“It has been so, so fun to throw yourself into something totally foreign and learn.
“You give me something in a straight line that requires power and speed, I am there, but this is just a completely different way of moving.
“You can’t power through ice, it just doesn’t work. You have to flow with it.
“The other super-frustrating thing has been learning the choreography. I’m so slow — poor Andy, he’s so patient, but it drives me nuts.
“I come from a very academic background. I can memorise pages and pages of organic chemistry formulas, but choreography just pops right out of my head.
“It’s been hard, and then throw figuring out what to do with an artificial leg on top of that, it’s a challenge, to say the least. But honestly, it’s been so fun. I think the fact that it’s been so hard is what’s intrigued me so much.”
So did she feel a sense of pressure to live up to her Paralympic success on the ice?
Stef said: “Weirdly, no. People expect me to be strong — nobody expects me to be able to dance or perform. I don’t think people even really expected me to be able to skate with an artificial leg.
“So I haven’t felt a huge sense of pressure that way. I always put a huge amount of pressure on myself anyway.
“I’m constantly frustrated with myself for not being able to move in the way I’d love to move.”
So far in the competition Stef has managed to hold her own, but has struggled to get into the top half of the leaderboard.
She has been kept at bay by the show’s trio of pro dancer competitors, former Strictly star Brendan Cole, Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt and Regan Gascoigne.
She said: “I picked the worst year to participate in Dancing On Ice. I should have done it in previous years — the standard is so high this year.”
But Stef has no complaints about the pro dancers’ advantage over their rivals, saying: “Everybody has different strengths.
“One thing Andy and I use to our advantage is that I’m super-strong. We can do a lot of the more advanced lifts and I have to be strong enough to hold myself as he spins, otherwise that gets very, very dangerous.
“I’m doing the best I can and I will try and keep pace for as long as I can and just show that we are improving.”
Stef will get another chance to show off her sexy side tomorrow night when she takes to the ice with Andy to perform to Madonna hit Material Girl.
The celebrities will be pushed to near breaking point this weekend as they tackle the show’s infamous Prop Week, with Stef and Andy having to incorporate a clothes rail into their routine.
But will they be throwing in some shocking stunts to try to climb the leaderboard?
Stef said: “The problem for me is that those tricks and lifts are always a 60/40 situation. You can’t throw something into a routine that is going to have a 60 or 40 per cent fail rate, it’s too risky.
“We have to make a call between what works and what doesn’t, which is a shame. Again, you just think, ‘oh, if I just had more time’, but that’s the whole point — there isn’t time.
“That’s what makes this exciting. We’ll do the best that we can for as long as we can.”
