Champion jockey brutally attacked with rock beating trauma as competitive bodybuilder

A champion jockey who feared for her life during a brutal car-jacking outside her home has transformed herself into a ripped bodybuilder.

Two years ago Sonja Logan was attacked by a group of men trying to steal her car. During a terrifying ordeal they threw a brick through her window, then smashed her in the face with a rock. Her nose was broken in three places, her lip cut and her front teeth broken three weeks before her wedding day. The men, who made off when the alarm was raised, have never been caught.

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“They were just coming to steal the car,” Logan, 33, told Mirror Racing. “They smashed my face in with a rock but also put a concrete slab through one of my windows. It wasn’t fun!

“I called the police but they never showed up, the ambulance did. The cops rocked up to my hospital room four hours later. They weren’t very helpful.”

Logan’s face and teeth were put back together in hospital in time for her to walk down the aisle with local trainer Tommy Logan in their home city of Darwin, Australia, and she was back in the saddle almost immediately.

“I tried to pretend like it never happened,” she said. “It probably worked for a little while but I had a lot of anxiety. I would hear people around the house. Large groups of men would make me feel quite tense. Internally I wasn’t dealing with it.

“I turned to drinking. I would sit down at the stables in the afternoon and would have six beers then come home and have another two or three or four. I am only 162cm so that amount of alcohol was quite a lot for me.

“I just went into this dark place of drinking and pretending everything was perfect when really I was struggling. I would get in the shower at night and would cry. I hid a lot from everyone. It was a pretty rough eight or nine months.”

While slumping into depression, Logan continued to ride successfully. The jockey with 533 career wins took out the Alice Spring premiership in the most recent season but behind the scenes was struggling.

“I found out about this six week bodybuilding challenge where you could win A$2,000 [£1,000] so I entered it. I’d not set foot in a gym for two years. I worked really hard and I stopped drinking midway through it. This was my release.

“I changed my eating habits. My weight was 56kg when I started and at the end I was 51kg. I was feeling good and I fell in love with it. If I was having a bad day I would take it out on the next set of whatever I was working on.

“A year later I stepped onto the stage as a bodybuilder for the first time. I won the premiership in Alice Springs and was the top rider in the Northern Territories. The gym set me on a forward path and the results showed. I had an incredible season.”

Logan’s new regime of bulking to build muscle and ‘prepping’ to burn fat is carefully tailored to maintain her race riding weights but brings benefits. “The strength and fitness is great for riding,” she said. “My balance is so much better because my muscles are stronger around my hips.”

Logan has made the podium in three of the four events she has competed in. The anxiety has gone.

“Mentally I feel tenfold stronger,” she said. “I literally feel like I could take on the world, where before I started I would have happily curled up in a black hole and stayed there.

“I hope my journey helps someone else who is struggling. The racing game as a whole has its own mental boundaries as a high pressure sport. Having another outlet does help.

“We have our awards night this Saturday so I can celebrate the fact that I kicked arse this year!”