“Sometimes things have to get ugly before they get better.”The words of golfer Leonie Harm, who won her first Ladies European Tour title in May, cementing the 28-year-old’s achievement on home soil at the German Masters as one of the most inspirational sports stories of the year.In 2013, aged 15, Harm was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver, who was travelling at 44mph, when crossing the street in her native Heidelberg, a city in south-west Germany. The paramedics, arriving at the scene to see blood dripping from both her ears, feared the teenager would not survive.The injuries were multiple: a fractured skull, broken hip, ankle, ribs and a collapsed lung. She spent five days in an induced coma. When Harm woke up, she had no memory of the incident, just a bad feeling something serious had happened. The last thing she remembered was her mother, Desiree, telling her to “sleep fast,” just like she always had before bedtime.Seven weeks later, Harm was back on the golf course.But the “ugly” that Harm describes in our interview is not just about her near-death experience.In 2014, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two years later, in the summer of 2016, she passed away. Harm was 19.“My brother (Steffen) and my dad (Hans-Dieter) were quite shocked by how quickly it happened,” Harm says. “But my mom and I were really close, to the point where I was maybe the one person she did confide in that it was serious and it was gonna be over within weeks, not months.“I saw her suffer to the point where the life she was living towards the end wasn’t a life that she wanted for herself. It was a lot of pain.“Obviously, losing a parent under any circumstances, at any age, is never good. It’s always awful. It’s always a horrific loss. It always hits you. But I had the chance to say goodbye. We were all in the same country and maybe her body was waiting for that to be able to say goodbye.”Harm pauses. The memories, the grief, the emotion of it all is flooding back. “And I’m crying again, man.”After Harm’s golfing career ends, she wants to dedicate her life to cancer research. A biochemistry and biophysics sciences graduate of the University of Houston, during the COVID pandemic she worked for biotech company CureVac AG trying to find a vaccine candidate.