Sam Bloom

Sam Bloom
Full name	Samantha Bloom
nation	Australia
birthday	1971
place of birth	Australia
job	Nurse
Career
discipline	Paracanoe
Boat class	KL1
National squad	since 2015
status	active
Medal table
Paralympics 0 × 0 × 0 × World championships 0 × 0 × 0 × Oceania Championships 1 × 0 × 0 ×
Oceania Championships gold 2016 Adelaide One kayak
last change: June 9, 2017

Samantha "Sam" Bloom (* 1971 ) is an Australian parakanut . The trained nurse, paralyzed by an accident , gained international fame through social media and the book Penguin Bloom .

Life

Sam Bloom grew up in Newport Beach, a suburb of the Australian metropolis of Sydney . She studied at the University of Technology in Sydney and worked on the side in her parents' bakery, where she met the photographer Cameron, her future husband. After graduation, she worked as a nurse at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown, a suburb of Sydney. The couple had three sons. Bloom suffered a serious accident while on vacation in Thailand in 2013. A rotten railing on a hotel terrace caused them to fall six meters down. She survived the accident with severe head and back injuries and has been paraplegic ever since. When Bloom was released from the hospital after seven months, she had lost her will to live and was suffering from severe depression .

Three months after returning home, one of her sons found an injured flute chick in a parking lot . He took the animal home and the family decided to foster it. The children called the animal Penguin because of its color and waddling gait . The bird became tame, and Sam Bloom took his recovery as an opportunity to come to terms with her paralysis and find his way back into her life. Penguin lived with the Bloom family for about two years and grew into an internet phenomenon . The Instagram account penguinthemagpie created by the family had over 150,000 followers in June 2017. Cameron Bloom published the book Penguin Bloom in 2016 .

Athletic career

Having overcome her depression, Bloom began paracanoe classification Trek. She trained at the Manly Warringah Kayak Club and became a member of the Australian National Paracanoe Team in 2015. At the Canoe Racing World Championships 2015 in Milan , she reached the semifinals in class KL1. In the same year she won the gold medal at the Oceania Championships in Paracanoe in Adelaide, Australia . At the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro , Bloom took seventh place.

Penguin Bloom

An Australian flute bird

Bloom's husband Cameron published the book Penguin Bloom - The odd little bird who saved a family together with the Australian author Bradley Trevor Greive in 2016 , in which he documented the fate of his wife and the coexistence with the bird. The book became a bestseller in Australia and was subsequently translated into Japanese and Korean. The book was published in Germany in February 2017 under the title Penguin Bloom - The Little Bird That Saved Our Family and reached number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list.

The American actress and producer Reese Witherspoon secured the film rights to the story of Sam Bloom and Penguin in 2017. The role of Sam is to be played in the film adaptation of Naomi Watts . In 2019 it was announced that Andrew Lincoln would cast Cameron Bloom, and Jacki Weaver will also play a role in the film. The director is Glendyn Ivin , the film is expected to be released in 2020.

literature

• Cameron Bloom, Bradley Trevor Greive: Penguin Bloom - The Little Bird That Saved Our Family . Albrecht Knaus Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-641-21058-8 .

Web links

• Penguin Bloom - The odd little bird who saved a family

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Classification Masterlist Paracanoe. International Canoe Federation, May 25, 2017, accessed June 9, 2017 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Cameron Bloom: Penguin Bloom: Sam Bloom's unlikely savior. The Australian, March 19, 2016, accessed June 9, 2017 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b} The Tiny Bird Who Saved My Life After a Devastating Accident. TIME, April 18, 2017, accessed June 9, 2017 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b} This story is very bitter - and at the same time very sweet. Stern, February 12, 2017, accessed June 9, 2017 . 
5. ↑ Successful Oceania Paracanoe Championships. Queensland Canoeing Incorporated, July 1, 2015, accessed June 9, 2017 . 
6. ↑ How Elster 'Pinguin' saved this family from collapse. RTL Next, February 23, 2017, accessed on June 9, 2017 . 
7. ^ Penguin Bloom. buchreport, June 2017, accessed on June 9, 2017 . 
8. ↑ Sebastian Milpetz: Andrew Lincoln in "Penguin Bloom": First role since "The Walking Dead". TV feature film, August 14, 2019, accessed on August 26, 2019 .