TO millions of Gladiators fans she was Rio, the stunning undefeated 6ft 2in Queen of The Duel.
Then after a role as a stunt-woman in the 2000 Russell Crowe movie Gladiator, she made a career writing about motorbikes.
But Jane Omorogbe owes her first steps on the road to fame as Rio, the Saturday night telly titan, thanks to entering a contest run by The Sun.
Today, aged 52 and living in Belgium, she reveals how a photo in Britain’s favourite paper nearly 30 years ago changed her life for ever.
Her amazing story started in 1995 when Jane, then 23, was working as an ambulance driver in Hastings, East Sussex.
In an exclusive interview — with The Sun, naturally — she recalled: “I was delivering a patient to the hospital and on the way back to the ambulance we popped into the little newsagents on the site.
“There was The Sun, which said on the front page, ‘Become Miss United Kingdom and win £25,000’.
“I went home to my then boyfriend.
“I was ironing and I said to him, ‘Oh, by the way, I was thinking, why don’t I enter Miss United Kingdom, because if I win I’ll get 25 grand and we can live happily ever after?’
“I thought he’d say, ‘Wouldn’t that be great?’ and talk about what we could buy with the prize money.
“Instead, he said, ‘You, win Miss United Kingdom? I don’t think so’.
“I wasn’t going to enter but his reaction put my back up, so we parted and I entered Miss United Kingdom 1995.”
To get to the final, at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s Mayfair, contestants had to win a regional heat.
By the time Jane entered The Sun competition there was only one title left — Miss Wessex.
The venue in Weymouth, Dorset, was 160 miles from Hastings, so her uncle, Bob, took her to the New Forest, half way, on his motorbike.
There, another uncle, Vic, was waiting to race Jane the final leg on his bike, just in time for the Miss Wessex competition.
She said: “Striding down the catwalk for the first time ever was such fun.
“Afterwards I’d already got changed back into my leathers, because I thought there was no way I was going to win, when they called my name as the winner.
“I quickly put the frock back on that I had jammed in my rucksack then went out to collect my sash.
“In the photos other girls looked like full-time models but I looked totally bemused, holding a bunch of flowers and a bottle of cider.
“I couldn’t carry them on the motorbike so I had to give them away.”
On the eve of the Miss UK final The Sun ran a centre spread featuring the 20 girls who would compete for that £25,000 prize and the chance to be in the Miss World contest.
Jane did not win, but a copy of The Sun with the article — with a tiny photo of her in a pink swimsuit — was left on a train and read by former Olympian John Anderson, the Gladiators’ Scottish referee who had been looking for new stars for the pro gramme.
He made contact with Jane via The Sun and told her he thought she had what it took to be a Gladiator.
But then came a blow when John decided she was not yet fit enough to join the hit show, which had already been going for three years.
So he put her in touch with Tony Slaney, coach of the British taekwondo martial arts team.
Jane said: “I remember Tony saying, ‘This will change your life but you have got to go for it.
“’You have to give up your job and train full-time’.
“So I went back to the ambulance service and told my station officer, ‘I’m leaving to seek my fame and fortune, sir’.
“I gave up a secure job, rented my house and sold everything I owned.
“Everyone thought I’d gone mad, because it was all on a whim from some guy I’d met twice who said, ‘You can probably do it’.
“I got on a train to Peterborough with a suitcase, blubbing because I was scared, and moved in with Tony and his wife Linda, who treated me like family.”
For more than six months she trained daily to become fit enough for Gladiators.
With no income, The Sun sponsored Jane’s training by hiring her for photoshoots.
Only recently Tony revealed that if she had failed to become a Gladiator he had planned to train her for the Olympics as a taekwondo fighter.
But Plan B was not needed.
And when Jane was accepted for the ITV show, we asked readers to suggest Gladiator names for her.
She recalled: “One of the suggestions was Gazelle, ‘Because of long legs’, and Siren, ‘Because I’d worked for the ambulance service’.
“It was decided I should be called Rio because I reminded them of a Brazilian carnival, which was quite a compliment.”
Born in 1971 to Nigerian parents in Newcastle upon Tyne, her family moved to Hastings when Jane was five, but she always felt different from other children.
She said: “I grew up being a bit uncomfortable with my size.
“I was so tall when all my friends were so petite.
“I felt like the odd one out.
“I’m far bigger and stronger than everyone else and there had to be a reason, but I couldn’t figure it out.
“Being on Gladiators was a magical experience.
“It gave me such validation and a different level of appreciation for who I naturally am.
“It also helped me to a level of self-respect that I probably was lacking in having to push myself on every level you could possibly imagine.
“I used to have lessons from the cheerleaders because I wasn’t comfortable going out into the arena in that bikini and flaunting it.
“They gave me lessons in ‘shoulders back, chin up, bit of sass’.
“I’m forever grateful to them because they taught me how to at least pretend I was confident until I was.
“Fake it till you make it till you become it.”
Then in 1999 came another new opportunity.
Jane said: “I got a call from one of the other Gladiators, Diesel — Daz Crawford, an actor in Hollywood now.
He said, ‘I’ve just gone for an audition for a movie role.
“I didn’t get it but they are looking for Amazonian black women who are fit and attractive’.”
Thanks to that call, Jane ended up filming in Malta as a stunt woman on the movie Gladiator.
She said: “In the film I’m the girl who was gruesomely cut in half.
“I was lucky enough to meet Russell Crowe and Oliver Reed, who was so magnetic and larger-than-life.”
After Jane and her fellow Gladiators found out from The Sun that the show was being axed in 2000 she became our motorcycle correspondent for seven years.
By 2007 she had fallen in love and moved to near Antwerp, where she married and had a son.
The marriage ended, and her son is now 12.
She is still in the gym most days and teaches fitness, mostly to mainly women.
Her phone has not stopped ringing since Gladiators relaunched on January 6, with former stars comparing notes on the new BBC show.
Jane said: “The new stars will find being on Gladiators is life-changing.
“I still can’t believe it all started with that tiny picture of me in The Sun in that pink swimming costume.”
