THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
STEVE HISLOP 1962–2003
HIZZY
with STUART BARKER
For Aaron and Connor Hislop – sons of a very special dad
Contents
1 Day Number One, Life Number Two
1 Day Number One, Life Number Two
‘I’d been trying to race bikes for a month with a broken neck.’
Everyone thought I was dead – except me because I wasn’t thinking at all.
I lay unconscious in the gravel trap at Brands Hatch with my neck broken in two places, my spinal cord twisted into an ‘S’ shape and with a fragment of bone impregnated in the main nerve to my left arm. It was one of the most horrendous-looking crashes anyone had ever witnessed – and there were more than 100,000 people at the race that day. Even the national newspapers hailed it as the worst crash ever seen on TV.
World Superbike riders Neil Hodgson, Colin Edwards and Noriyuki Haga all got tangled up at about 120mph going into the fearsome Paddock Hill bend at Brands Hatch during the year 2000 WSB meeting. Neil had clipped the kerb because he couldn’t see where he was going as all the other riders were so tightly bunched. His bike bounced back onto the track and started a chain reaction and I got caught up in the mêlée as Haga rammed my back wheel and Edwards took my front wheel away. The result was total carnage: there were bikes and riders tumbling everywhere, bits and pieces flying off the machinery and scything through the air and sparks showering down the track as metal collided with tarmac.
As my bike was rammed, I was thrown 15 feet in the air and started cartwheeling towards the gravel trap. My bike was spinning end over end and it slammed into my head twice – all 350lb of it – sending me tumbling even more spectacularly. It’s a good job it did too because, ironically, that’s probably what saved my life. The first smack it gave me knocked me out so I was unconscious as I tumbled and that meant my body was limp and relaxed. Had I been conscious and tensed up, I would probably have done even more damage to myself.
After doing four full-body cartwheels, I landed square on the top of my head with my feet pointing straight up in the air, as if I’d been planted in the ground by the celebrity gardener, Alan Titchmarsh. Then finally I tumbled over, came to a halt and slumped into the gravel, knocked out cold and lifeless as the dust began to settle and the bike finally came to a stop. The race was stopped immediately and the huge crowd that had been screaming and cheering just seconds before then, fell completely silent. Joey Dunlop had been killed in a race just one month previously and no one wanted to witness more tragedy at what should have been a fun day out. I don’t know what the millions of armchair fans watching on TV around the world thought but what did annoy me afterwards was that it took such a horrific crash to get bike racing onto the main news. Usually the sport is never considered important enough to be mentioned on TV news bulletins unlike football, cricket, golf, Formula One or tennis. It was only when I had such a horrendous smash that almost every country in the world ran a story on it. What a way to get famous.
But if it weren’t for the TV coverage, I wouldn’t be able to describe the crash in detail because I can’t remember it. The last thing I remember was feeling a thump when I was banking hard into Paddock Hill bend and that must have been when Haga hit me. Because the crash looked so bad and because I had landed on my head and wasn’t moving, everyone who witnessed it presumed I was dead. My girlfriend Kelly, who was watching on TV back home, was in hysterics and couldn’t get through to anyone in my team when she tried to call to find out if I was alive or dead. The Virgin Yamaha team wasn’t taking calls because they were too busy trying to find out if they still had a rider. Kelly had to wait for about two hours before she got through to someone who told her I was OK. At first she didn’t believe it and thought I must at least be in a coma, but someone finally convinced her that I was conscious and moving.
The first thing I remember through a foggy, dizzy haze was hearing a paramedic’s voice shouting, ‘there’s a good vein, stick it in there,’ as they immediately tried to stabilize me by hooking me up to an IV drip and an oxygen mask. Apart from that,