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Ms. Kruger fell off a ladder two storeys high when she was 15 while working for a house painting company. She broke her neck in four places and the accident left her with quadriplegia. Ms. Kruger has impairment to all four limbs, but still has function of her arms.

“She is someone that we can all look at and learn from,” said Ms. Ladouceur, adding that Ms. Kruger was not selected because of her disability. “We definitely chose her because she has just been so positive about everything that happened to her. It’s more about what she made out of it.”

After the accident, Ms. Kruger continued to pursue her passions. She loved sports so she took up wheelchair rugby. She loved travelling so she went on trips to Kenya, Spain and Scotland.

She now trains five days a week as a member of the B.C. provincial co-ed wheelchair rugby team and her goal is to join the national team.

She didn’t lose her sense of adventurous or stubbornness either. In Mexico, she even decided she was going to go on an uphill hike.

“My sister dragged my wheelchair and I up 365 stairs,” she said. “We were at it for about three hours.”

Beyond athletics, she’s a self-professed “girly-girl” who wants to challenge the stereotype of models as airheads and aims to prove the beauty industry can be inclusive.

“I want people to understand that I’m more than just a face, but because I’m in a wheelchair doesn’t mean that I can’t also be [a model],” she said.

“It’s not just me having some fantasy that’s never going to happen. The world is actually ready to see somebody in a wheelchair be a model.”

As a beauty ambassador for Lise Watier, Ms. Kruger will appear in magazine advertisements, in a video of the competition and in product advertisements at Shoppers Drug Mart where the perfume will be carried.

She will also give speeches and “surf on the wave of media attention,” said Ms. Ladouceur.