As I was stretchered off to the nearest hospital I started coming round a little and that’s when I felt a pain in my chest and thought I might have broken my back. I was also getting a prickly feeling every time a medic touched me but it turned out that I was just covered in thousands of scratches from the gravel as I tumbled through it.
Anyone who thinks motorcycle racing is glamorous only needs to experience one big crash to realize it’s not. The frequent injuries are bad enough to deal with but the undignified hospital procedures are just as bad. On this occasion, I was still feeling groggy when a doctor wearing rubber gloves approached me and that can mean only one thing. Sure enough, I jolted as he inserted a finger straight up my backside and had a prod around but at least he was kind enough to explain the theory he was putting into practice. Apparently, men have a kind of ultra-sensitive G-spot up there and if you hit the ceiling when the doctor touches it, you’ve got a broken back. I’d have thought most blokes would hit the ceiling anyway when a doctor shoves a finger up their arse, broken back or not but apparently I didn’t flinch too violently so the prognosis was good even if the examination wasn’t.
I was then x-rayed and pushed into a little cubicle and left on my own for what seemed like an eternity as I still hadn’t a clue what was happening to me. Coming round from concussion is not a nice experience and even though I’d been knocked out several times before, it doesn’t get any easier because you’re starting from scratch every time it happens as you’ve got no memories to draw upon.
I was really scared lying in there trying to piece my world together bit by bit. Where am I? What day is it? What year is it? The answer to every question was the same – I didn’t know. I could only lie there like a newborn baby staring at the curtains round my bed, my brain completely devoid of any memory, any sense of belonging or any history; any sense of anything in fact. It really was like being born again – I didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on.
Eventually, with a huge effort, I remembered I’d been at Brands Hatch but I still couldn’t remember what year it was. I became convinced it was 1999 and only realized it was the year 2000 because I remembered which front suspension system I’d been using on the bike and that I’d been swapping between 1999 and 2000-spec forks that season. It’s the most horrible, helpless feeling there is but for bike racers, it comes with the territory and you’ve just got to get on with it.
Some time later, my team boss, Rob McElnea, came in to see me and started asking me questions. As a former racer himself, he knew the routine for concussion as well as anyone and when I could tell him who I was, where I was and what year it was he reckoned I was all right and tried to get me to sign myself out.
The doctors had checked all the x-rays and said the only thing that concerned them was a cloudy area around the C5 and C6 vertebrae in my neck. I told them I’d had a prolapsed disc in 1995 at that very spot which seemed to explain the cloudy area. I hate hospitals and when I looked around and saw an old woman who had choked on a sandwich and another old girl who hadn’t been able to shit for a month I thought, ‘I hate these places – I need to get out of here.’ So I signed myself out, even though the doctors wanted to keep me in overnight for observation, and I went back to the hotel that night. The following morning I drove my hire car to the airport and was back home on the Isle of Man a couple of hours after that.
When I saw a video of the crash on ITN news I realized how close to death or paralysis I had come. It looked much worse than triple world champion Wayne Rainey’s crash at Misano in 1993 did and he’s now wheelchair-bound for life because of that incident. Being paralysed or maimed scares me more than anything else in the world so I’d readily have chosen death over being stuck in a wheelchair. But then that’s a choice we never get to make – fate decides it for us.
But I wasn’t paralysed, I was just in pain all over. My head hit the inside of my helmet so hard that the mesh lining was imprinted on my forehead, and my forehead itself was so badly swollen that I looked like a Neanderthal. I had a black eye, my face was covered in cuts from where my helmet visor had come off allowing gravel to scratch my forehead and even my eyebrows were sore, although I can’t think how that happened. I felt as if I’d been put through a full cycle in a washing machine. However everything seemed to be in working order and I figured I’d be fully fit again in a few days, so that, as far as I was concerned, was the end of my Brands Hatch crash. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Just four days later I set off for a round of the British Superbike championship at Knockhill in Scotland. Everyone in the paddock was amazed to see me on my feet and most people, I think, were glad to see me alive. I managed to qualify for the races but felt really weak and couldn’t hold myself up on the bike properly. I figured I must have come back too early and since there were two weeks to recuperate before the next round at Cadwell Park, I decided to sit out the Knockhill meeting just to be on the safe side.
During those two weeks I had some physiotherapy and tried to lift some light weights but I still felt really weak down my left hand side. Then a really peculiar thing started to happen – I started walking into doors. I would put my left hand out to push open a door but my arm just buckled under the slightest strain so I’d end up slamming my face into the door. I wasn’t in any pain (apart from the fact that I kept banging my nose), but I just had no strength or feeling in my left arm. It was weird.
Anyway, I went to Cadwell as planned but in the first few laps of practice it was apparent that something wasn’t right. When you brake for a corner on a motorcycle you lift your body up out of the racing crouch to act as a windbreak which helps slow you down. This involves locking your arms against the handlebars as you lift up but every time I tried it I almost fell off the left-hand side of the bike. My left arm was just folding under pressure and it was way too dangerous to continue. I tried taking the strain on my knees against the fuel tank or with just my right arm on the bar but nothing seemed to work, so after six laps I pulled into the pits.
Everyone asked me what was wrong and I said I had no idea. I wasn’t in pain, I just couldn’t ride the bloody bike. Rob McElnea got really mad because he thought I was cracking up. I’ve been blamed a lot over the years for being fragile or temperamental when it comes to racing a bike because my results have not always been consistent and Rob probably thought that I just couldn’t be bothered to ride or that I’d lost my bottle for some reason.
You’ve got to realize that in motorcycle sport, it’s very common for riders to compete with freshly broken bones, torn ligaments or any other number of painful injuries. A trackside doctor is always on hand to administer painkilling injections to numb the pain for the duration of the race if required and riders often have special lightweight casts made to hold broken bones in place while they race. Basically, they will try anything just to go out and score some points so for me to explain that I was not in pain but just couldn’t ride the bike must have sounded a bit odd to say the least.
Anyway, there was no way I could race but I hung around Cadwell anyway and at one point bumped into a neurosurgeon I knew called Ian Sabin. He was a bike-racing fan and came to meetings when time permitted. I explained my problem so he carried out a few tests in the mobile clinic that attends all race meetings. He asked me to push against his hands as he held them out and I nearly pushed him over with my right hand but couldn’t apply any pressure at all with my left hand. After another couple of simple tests he told me I had nerve damage and needed to get an MRI scan as soon as possible.
I went to London for a scan and had to pay the £600 fee out of my own pocket but it was the best £600 I’ve ever spent as it probably saved my life (and I eventually claimed it back through my insurance anyway). Ian looked at the results and I could immediately tell he was worried. He didn’t tell me what he saw at that point but called another department and told them I needed an ECG test immediately. It was only then that he turned to me and said, ‘Steven, you have a broken neck. What’s more, you have been walking around and trying to race bikes for the last four weeks with a broken neck.’
Fuck! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could I possibly have a broken neck and not notice? How did the hospital not diagnose it straight