Former track athlete Stef Reid a leading voice in push to put figure skating on Paralympic programme

As a long jumper, Stef Reid never thought she'd need to learn how to land on ice. Now she's part of a movement hoping to get figure skating into the Paralympics.

Skating sports are a big gap on the programme when the Winter Paralympics start on Friday. Figure skaters with disabilities challenge the norm in a sport with often-fixed ideas about how a skater should look.

Reid's path to figure skating is unique. An amputee athlete who won three Paralympic medals in track and field, she was a familiar face on British TV. Being invited to appear on the 2022 series of a celebrity skating show, "Dancing On Ice," still came as a shock.

"It had just never crossed my mind because it is probably one of the last sports you think about for somebody with a physical disability," Reid tells the AP.

"Even if you are quote-unquote `able bodied,' it's still dangerous, and so it just never really occurred to me. But when they asked, I was like, 'This is amazing.'"

Learning to skate meant Reid, who uses a prosthetic right leg after a boating accident at 15, had to find ways to train her hip muscles to do the jobs other skaters' knees and ankles do. Her prosthetist developed a leg that would let her glide across the ice.

"Every day, every week it would be a new prototype which meant all the pressure points were different, and I basically was having to start over again," she says.

"There was a very large period where we just thought,`Maybe this just isn't going to work. Maybe this is a bit of a step too far,' and then this amazing thing happened. After 10 weeks of being really bad, my brain just kind of kicked into gear."

Reid built momentum and reached the quarterfinals of "Dancing On Ice" after weeks of live competition for a national