Liliane Cambré sits on the terrace at the golf course at Vila Sol, on the Algarve, leisurely drinking a coffee before making her final preparations for her first round in the EDGA Algarve Open (late November, 2023).
This bright and friendly woman who lives in Lille, Belgium, smiles and chats with her fellow players. Her relaxed politeness belies at first the adventurous spirit that has long been within her, and perhaps more lately the courage she has had to draw upon. The other G4D (golf for the disabled) players here for the tournament clearly respect her and enjoy talking to Liliane. Meanwhile, these fellow travellers might not realise that Liliane is in fact an adventurous traveller par excellence, a true globetrotter (of which, more later), while with a golf club in her hand she is also a force to be reckoned with (more later!), although you could not have a more welcoming playing partner. “That is another very important thing,” she tells us. “We must always enjoy it, that’s what we are here for.”
Today on the clubhouse terrace at Vila Sol, Liliane has risen early as is her normal routine because six years after her accident, she needs a little time to prepare her body for the rigours of tournament day. Work is needed on her left leg to “get going”, lots of stretches before the actual practice on her long and short game so that she is ready to play well. Crucially, the liquorice drops are also ready in her golf bag (again, more later).
When I presume to ask her if she can win the tournament she laughs and says, “We will see!” but with a modest shake of the head. It is actually the second time she is competing in Portugal in an EDGA tournament, the last time at Pinhal, Vilamoura, she won the Stableford by a shot, so who knows?
Liliane says she is not here with winning first and foremost in her mind, but also to help raise awareness for other people with an injury to show them that they too can enjoy a healthy activity. At these EDGA G4D events she says she loves meeting fellow players and is always impressed by their will to play well on the course but also have a great time together after the round. This also serves to remind her that the accident with the truck, when she was hit by a vehicle in 2017, could have been so much worse for her. “The spirit here, it gives you energy,” says Liliane. “Meeting up in something we all love.”
She says: “When I see the other people here, it helps a lot to reflect and to say okay, this [my injury] is minor. When I meet the others I feel empathy but am also impressed with, the players who are in the Paragolfer [playing from a powered chair] for example, how much they have to put in to play.
“And it helps to motivate you, you need courage and you need to work. I always said to my doctor in Leuven, I have so many things I want to do. I remember he said, you can do everything in life you want. It takes a little more time, a lot of effort, but you can do whatever you want, and it is true. It’s true!”
Liliane had always been a sporty person: growing up she was figure skating, playing ice hockey, and also dressage on the horse in her early twenties. The accident never took away her enjoyment of life but she is aware that if her injuries had been worse she may have needed more help to get back to life. She tells us that there are too many people who become isolated because of a disability and agrees that golf is a wonderful way of socialising, it’s not all about competing but getting out to a golf club: putting, chipping, learning a new game while making new friends.
But we are itching to ask more about her sense of adventure. This became apparent she explains after meeting her husband, Jan, in her early thirties. They first travelled out to Peru for a holiday before cycling for a year in South America. It was then the pair really acquired the ‘wanderlust’, which would lead in 2003 to the adventure of a lifetime.
Jan would suddenly put on hold his job in the sawmill in Lille. Liliane was a secretary at the court house in Arendonk, near the Dutch border. Because of high unemployment in the early 2000s in Belgium, the government offered public employees three-year sabbaticals from their jobs. The only slight downside was that the 300 Euros per month state contribution wasn’t that much to live on. Unless of course you invested in a ‘Round the World’ air ticket, purchased a tent and cooking stove and got on your bike, which is exactly what Jan and Liliane did for the next three years.
They first flew to New York ready to cycle as much of each country they travelled to before flying on. From NY along the Appalachian Trail before heading up to Alaska to cycle down The Rockies to New Mexico, before flying to Columbia and Brazil; then all the way southwards and across to Easter Island, New Zealand and Australia. Next on the plan was to cycle the ancient ‘Silk Road’ trade route which connects Southern Europe and Africa to the Far East, but the Tsunami then hit in 2004.
“Because Indonesia and the south of Thailand was flooded, we couldn’t do it,” said Liliane. “So we had to fly up to Chiang Mai in Thailand, and then we cycled the north of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, on to Myanmar, and then all the way to Beijing.
“And at that time, three years were over and we had seen so many things. We’d seen the Niagara Falls; we crossed the Rocky Mountains, we did the Andes. And then going to China, and I was fed up with the mountains. I said to my husband, not the Andes again, I’m not going to cross the Andes.”
In 2006, it was time to go home. “And now today I say, let’s make the trip again, but this time on golf courses.”
At an evening party back home for fellow cyclists in 2009, one of the group started talking enthusiastically about golf and Liliane thought this may be a game for her. She booked some lessons, took to it well, and it fuelled her competitive streak. She joined GolfClub Witbos (White Woods) in Noorderwijk which was the home club of tour golfer Thomas Pieters. The club was founded in 1965 by British soldiers and is unusual in having 13 holes. Witbos became a home from home for Liliane and she was enjoying regular competition with the other members; she remains a loyal member to this day.
The accident happened in 2017 when they were on holiday in Iceland. Walking along a street near the docks she was hit on one side by an on-coming truck and knocked under one of the wheels, severely crushing her left leg as the driver hit the brakes. That the truck was a single wheel model, having no load (it was late afternoon) and was being driven slowly, all contributed to Liliane’s survival she believes.
Icelandic surgeons saved her leg before she spent three months in hospital back home in Leuven, and then two months in a rehab clinic in Turnhout.
“The first thing when I came out of surgery, I was feeling if I still had legs. And then the first question I asked the nurse was, can I still play golf? And she said carefully, I think so. Then after 10 days they brought me to Belgium to the university hospital, and they reconstructed the leg. Of course the foot is blocked, the ankle is shattered, muscles are cut, but I have the leg.”
Liliane invented her own addition to therapy. “I was in the rehab unit and asked for my putter and three balls. I balanced myself against the bed so that I wouldn’t fall and I was putting in the room. When I putted the three balls, I had to take the steps to get them back. So that was my exercise and it worked!”
Liliane thanks her husband, members of her family including her twin sister Chris, lots of members and staff at Witbos, including a great golfing friend, for keeping her going, many visitors to the hospital. It was a tough few months, 30 times she had to go under general anaesthetic for surgery to rebuild her leg. Liliane would learn that the surgeons who treated her in Iceland were well-used to saving legs in complex procedures as so many fishermen came in with similar injuries.
One of her rewards, when she was fit enough, was to be invited by Belgium’s Ryder Cup star Thomas Pieters to watch the Belgian Knock-out on the DP World Tour in 2018, at Rinkven Golfclub near Antwerp, and she remembers chatting with Thomas and later England’s Chris Wood in the Players’ Lounge about their competing in the game at the highest level.
The Belgian Golf Federation and Golf Vlaanderen have been supporters, including providing coaching sessions for Liliane and other G4D players. She returns the favour and has visited a rehab centre (called To Walk Again) at Herentals’ regional hospital, to encourage others with bad injuries that there is always hope to get back to some good activity and that inclusive golf formats indoors or outside can have a transforming effect. Liliane herself will use a buggy on the course when playing competitions but if she encounters a relatively flat course she is also happy to walk nine holes or so and play.
The legacy of being hit by the truck plays a part in every day of Liliane’s life. When she gets up in the morning she must do lymph drainage on the leg for one hour to boost the circulation, a task she also must do every evening. Meanwhile, the rehab continues six years on. Liliane has a session with a physical exercise coach three times a week and once a week she goes to ‘aqua gym’ to train in water with less resistance against her muscles.
When golfing, arriving at the course she likes to take her time to perform a series of stretches on her legs but also arms and back to help her move freely when hitting the shots.
Then she starts with her wedges, five shots, then 4, 5, 6 irons, through every club in the bag, five shots each, finishing with chipping and putting on the practice green.
Liliane’s current golf handicap is around 23. Having been pleased with her golfing progress before the accident, her leg injury has limited her freedom of movement in the swing, particularly through impact where previously she would have driven harder against the left leg and into her follow-through. “About 50 metres less” is her summation about her shorter driving distance, hence all her work to improve her skill and accuracy on the practice range.
Liliane has won EDGA supported tournaments in Portugal and Bavaria and she was in the Belgium team which won the Nations Cup as part of the EGA’s European Team Championship in 2022. She has been Belgium’s women’s national champion in two successive years and she is looking forward to playing in the Cairns Cup next year in America.
She plays three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Witbos, and will practise carefully on Tuesday and Thursday. Now that she is retired, she says she loves meeting friends at the club but she also has lots of other interests outside of golf. Husband Jan was never a convert to the game, he believes in great walks unspoiled, without a golf club in the hand, recently completing 2,500km around the Camino de Santiago pilgrims’ trail and, on retiring next year from the sawmill, he will walk from his home all the way to Rome, which is another 2,500km trek.
Just before her second round at Vila Sol (her first round of Stableford, 33 points, had put her in with a chance of winning), Liliane was suddenly offering around the liquorice drops on the terrace, as some of us were unfamiliar with these treats, especially the added salt variety. “Very good in the hot weather,” Liliane advised.
It wasn’t too hot by Algarve standards in late November. Teeing off in groups of three over two days Liliane played with Alessandra Donati, Gregorio Guglielminetti and Joachim Holzner of Italy, and Declan Burns of Ireland; players with a range of impairments who nevertheless all compete with marked intensity on the fairways. “We share so much fun and get to know each other and understand,” says Liliane.
The second round was underway, and four hours or so later, this writer checked the leaderboard to see the name ‘Liliane Cambré’ at the top as the winner of the Stableford division.
There is an old sporting theory, ‘Nice guys don’t win.’ Well, whether it was her preparation, her careful practice, the smiles she shared with her fellow players, her own intense focus that was in evidence from the rehab ward in 2017 to the first tee in November 2023, or maybe the salted liquorice drops, Liliane had disproved that theory once and for all. Nice people can win.
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