Grania Willismeets the inspirational rider who having bounced back from a ghastly car crash that left her with severe injuries aims to compete not only in next year's Paralympics but also in the 2012 Olympics

Liza Landau wants to ride for Ireland. She's done it plenty of times before, but never at the level she's aiming for now and certainly not since her accident. She's still piecing her life back together after a horrendous car crash, but the ambition to ride with the Tricolour on her saddlecloth still burns with the ferocity of old. It's just that now she's officially categorised as a disabled rider and next year's Paralympics in Beijing are her goal.

That 43-year-old Landau is even alive is incredible. That she's back riding horses and aiming for the very top level of her sport is nothing short of miraculous considering she spent over 40 hours trapped underwater after her car somersaulted off the road into a freezing Wicklow bog in October 2002.

Landau was born not in Ireland but in England on October 18th, 1963, but doesn't have a drop of English blood in her veins. Her mother, who died of cancer in 1998, was a Polish-born former Vogue model, who drank to escape the pain of being abandoned by her parents after the war. Landau's father is a chartered accountant of Russo-Austrian Jewish ancestry.

Endlessly told she was stupid because of her dyslexia, Landau was a stutterer who became anorexic and then bulimic, attempted suicide and later started abusing alcohol. After separating from the boyfriend she had followed to Ireland in 1991, she embarked on another relationship, which proved to be unhappy and has since ended.

Drinking heavily and with self-confidence at an all-time low, Landau found her suicidal tendencies beginning to resurface. But on the night of October 19th, 2002, she discovered her will to live was far stronger than her wish to die when her body was put to a test even survival experts would have baulked at.

Four-and-a half-years on, Landau remembers every detail.

It was the day after her 39th birthday, which had vanished in a haze of alcohol. She was driving home at around 6pm after having had a few drinks in the local pub, adding to her intake from the previous day. It was just getting dark and torrential rain was reducing visibility still further as she approached a bad right-hand bend in the road.

"All I can remember is a light, hearing a rustling noise and going, 'Oh s***'," she says, her green eyes glazing over with the memory. "I knew I was in trouble."

Now, with mature reflection, she's not sure there was another vehicle, not sure the light was headlights. But she does know she woke, presumably after being concussed in the impact, to find herself in complete darkness, drowning.

What Landau didn't know was her car was sinking upside down in a bottomless run-off ditch carrying bog water from nearby Carraig mountain.

"I didn't know I was in the car, but I did know I had to get away from the water. Every time I put my hand up anywhere I was blocked by something. It was like being in a coffin."

Miraculously, her hand found something it could hold on to. Still underwater, she hauled herself through a desperately narrow gap and, when her hips got stuck, she pulled with the desperation of the dying.

"Suddenly I realised I could breathe," she says, the relief still visible on her face four-and-a-half years later.

Landau had somehow squeezed almost her entire body through the steering wheel. By the time she was rescued, the flesh of her back had partially grown around the steering rod. Her left arm was trapped under her body, her legs still tangled in the steering wheel itself. But, with her head jammed under the pedals, she had found a life-saving air pocket in the footwell of the car.

Ironically, the fact she wasn't wearing a seatbelt probably saved her life, but that life was still hanging in the balance, quite literally. The car was wedged between the two banks of the river and was acting like a dam. The water was rising, both outside and inside the vehicle. And it rained, non-stop, for the entire weekend.

She tried calling for help. Then her cries turned to screams. But nobody came. Even the next day, when a group of charity walkers passed the crash site, they assumed the rear bumper sticking out of the water belonged to a dumped car. They had no idea there was someone inside, hanging on to life by a thread.

Landau assumed the all-encompassing darkness was night and she'd be able to get herself out of the car when dawn broke. But it turned out to be a night that lasted from Friday evening until nearly Monday lunchtime.

As the water rose, objects kept floating toward her in the dark. First her cigarettes. Then a packet of biscuits. Then a wax coat, which she tried to wedge behind her back to protect her kidneys from the cold. It floated away again.

Then, as her core temperature dropped dangerously low, she started to hallucinate. She thought she heard rats on the roof of the car and was terrified they'd get in and start gnawing at her. She knows now it was the sound of rain pelting down on the underbelly of the vehicle just above her head.

Able to move only her right arm, she kept lashing out with her elbow, trying to stop what she thought was the roof of the car caving in and crushing her, unaware it was the pedals pressing down on her head as she got weaker. Her left arm, crushed underneath her, was excruciatingly painful. Landau believed the water was acid eating into her flesh.

As she drifted in and out of consciousness, hypothermia meant she couldn't tell if the water was getting closer to her mouth, signalling her imminent death from drowning. But finally, she knew she was reaching the end as the oxygen started to run out.

"I couldn't breathe, but it wasn't the water, it was as though my throat had been plugged up. I knew I was dying and there was an incredible beauty in that feeling. It was so peaceful. Complete and utter peace. No more pain."

Her next memory is of waking up - more than 40 hours after the crash - in the harsh strip lighting of the intensive-care unit in Loughlinstown hospital. And, as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into almost three months there and in St Vincent's, she pieced together the story of her rescue and her rescuer.

Chaim Factor is a Dublin-born furniture designer whose workshop was almost round the corner from where Landau lay trapped under the freezing waters. He had driven, as always, to his workshop that October Monday morning, but then remembered he hadn't put out the bins and walked back along the road to his house. As a woodworker, he was probably the only person who would have noticed the damage to the saplings on the far side of the road. He went to investigate and only then saw the rear bumper and tail lights of the upended car.

He called the emergency services and made frantic calls for help to neighbouring Ballylusk Quarry. Using chains attached to an excavator, the rescue team started to drag the car out, but Factor stopped them. He realised that if there was a driver in the vehicle, possibly still alive, it was imperative they lifted the car so that the water would drain out of the passenger side. It was a lifesaving decision for which Factor was to receive an award from Irish Water Safety in February 2003.

After they prised open the back door, one of the paramedics felt for a pulse on the bloated, purplish-blue body. Nothing. Shaking his head at the sight of another grisly death on the roads, the paramedic moved to get back out of the car, but something made him turn and he felt once again for a sign of life. As he did so, in a scene reminiscent of Fatal Attraction, an arm snaked out of the water and grabbed hold of his wrist with such force he knew the apparent corpse was a person determined to live.

After months of physiotherapy and counselling, Landau has been left with severe nerve damage in both legs, and what little walking she can do is executed in a shuffling, painful gait. Both arms also suffered nerve damage and her left wrist and the fingers of her right hand are paralysed. Her thumbs still don't work properly.

Anything pressing on her skin is agonising. The pain is unending and excruciating. Painkillers and a morphine patch go only so far. And she's become allergic to the patch. She has been prescribed anti-epileptic drugs to try to stop the spasms in her legs that feel like acid being poured over her skin, but still they come.

It was a year before she could begin to walk, but even now, although a wheelchair and a motorised buggy are the easiest means of locomotion, her favourite form of transport is the massive chestnut gelding Caroloban Bridge, or Logan.

The gentle giant stands like a statue as Landau awkwardly hauls a ladder up to his side to climb into the saddle. And he is equally mannerly when she reverses the process, even allowing her to use his legs to haul herself back up off the ground when she collapses because her own legs won't hold her up.

It was just before Christmas 2003 that Landau first got back on to a horse, her former international eventer Butt Now.

"It was the most unbelievable feeling being back in the saddle," she says. "It was like I'd been given back my freedom. When I'm up on a horse I can run again. That's the one thing I miss, being able to run."

She cannot ride with stirrups; it hurts too much. And boots are out of the question, so she rides in bare feet at home and in socks when competing. She knits these knee-high black socks herself. She also has to wear splints on her wrists, holding the reins between her first two fingers.

It's been tough to accept she is now a disabled rider. But she is tough. She's come through abuse, self-abuse and one suicide bid. On top of that, she's survived an accident that would have killed most others.

In those dark, dreadful hours in her underwater "coffin", Landau promised God that if he let her live she would never abuse alcohol again. And she has kept the promise.

She still has the odd drink, but her days are too full and too precious for hangovers. Life now is for living.

With the proceeds from the sale of her cottage in the hills above Ashford, Co Wicklow, she bought a site across the road and has had a huge barn built to accommodate her horses at ground level and herself above. She lives there with six horses, a boisterous two-year-old Alsatian called Huey and an older but still feisty terrier called Daisy. But the money has run out and the debts are mounting.

Despite her disabilities, Landau laid all 2,000 square feet of tongued and grooved wooden flooring in the living area. She's been waiting three months for a local builder to come and put in the windows and says that if she has to wait much longer she'll do that too. She's done all the fencing on her nine-acre plot, does the mucking out, drives the tractor, drives herself and her horse to shows, in fact does more than most so-called able-bodied people would even contemplate doing.

Now she wants to show the world what she's made of. Her mother used to buy rosettes for her when, as a terrified youngster, she would fall off at the first fence in a show-jumping competition. Now she earns her accolades and she's ready and able to go to the very top. But horsepower is the problem.

Logan, still a novice on the dressage circuit, will be her ride at the international para-equestrian dressage fixture in Austria at the end of the month. And he could yet turn out to be good enough to get Landau to next year's Paralympics in Beijing. But there's a bigger dream and Logan might not be the right partner to make that dream come true.

"My big dream, bigger than just doing the Paralympics, is to represent Ireland in the able-bodied Olympics," she says. "I want to be in the Guinness Book of Records as the first rider to compete in both the Paralympics and the Olympics in 2012. And it's not just a dream. It will happen."

If determination were the key to making dreams come true, then Liza Landau will be at both the Olympics and the Paralympics in London in five years' time. But she needs more than just determination. She needs hard cash or, at the very least, a sponsor willing to put faith in her.

And, if some generous benefactor gifts her a horse with the ability to take her to Beijing and beyond, she certainly won't be looking in its mouth. She'll be looking for medals.

Paralympics

The Paralympics are, like the Olympics, an elite multi-sport event, except that the Paralympics are for athletes with physical disabilities - not to be confused with the Special Olympics, which are for those with intellectual disabilities.

The 1948 Stoke Mandeville Games, for second World War veterans with spinal-cord injuries, was the forerunner of the modern Paralympics, although the Paralympic concept wasn't born until 1960 in Rome.

Since 1988, the Summer Paralympics have been held, three weeks after the Olympics, in the city hosting the mainstream Games.

The name has nothing to do with paralysis or paraplegia, but is derived from the Greek para, meaning beside or alongside, referring to the competition being held in conjunction with the Olympic Games.

Paralympic athletes are assessed by accredited classifiers and graded on their disabilities, allowing athletes of similar impairment to compete against each other.

For the equestrian discipline of dressage, there are five grades of impairment, ranging from 1A for the most severely disabled to IV for the least impaired.

Liza Landau, despite her extensive disability, has been classified as Grade IV, meaning she competes at the toughest level against riders less severely disabled than her.