Hizzy: The Autobiography of Steve Hislop

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF

STEVE HISLOP 1962–2003

HIZZY

with STUART BARKER

For Aaron and Connor Hislop – sons of a very special dad

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1 Day Number One, Life Number Two

2 Shooting Crows

3 Off the Rails

4 Tales from the Riverbank

5 The Flying Haggis

6 The Burger Van Queue

7 Money, Money, Money

8 Girls, Girls, Girls

9 Bored

10 The Impossible Dream

11 A Day at the Races

12 The Champ

13 Sacked

14 Sacked Again

15 Swearing at Fairies

16 2002: A Race Odyssey

17 The Final Lap

18 A Scottish Hero

Career Results

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

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, everything was completely silent as the crowd looked on numbed and fearing the worst. There were paramedics swarming all over me and thankfully they knew to remove my helmet carefully with the aid of a neck brace because there was a risk of spinal injuries.

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 after the race? How do you fix a broken neck? Would I be able to ride again? All of these thoughts were rushing through my head as Ian explained that the C5 and C6 vertebra in my neck were broken and badly crushed as well. As a result of that my spinal column was twisted into an ‘S’ shape and to further complicate matters, a piece of sheared bone was chafing against the main nerve which controlled my left arm and was threatening to cut through it. No wonder I had no strength in it.

Ian said that I’d been incredibly lucky over the previous month because my head was, quite literally, hanging on by a bunch of fibres with no support from my spine. If I’d been slapped in the face or had knocked my head in any way, then that would have been the end of it – I’d have been dead, or even worse in my book, paralysed from the neck down. I thought back to all the daft things I’d done over the last month like going out on the piss when I could easily have fallen over. If I’d fallen off the bike at Knockhill or Cadwell, even if I’d slept on my neck in a funny position the results could have been catastrophic for me. The odds of not damaging the injury further in that month were incredible but somehow I’d beaten them. You could call it luck but I prefer to think of it as destiny: it simply wasn’t my time to die.

During the ECG test, they stuck needles in almost every muscle of my body and eventually found out that it was the nerve to my tricep muscle, in the rear of my left arm that had the most damage. It was deteriorating more with every passing day as the stray piece of bone gradually sawed its way through, and so I was scheduled for an operation as soon as possible.

Whilst I waited for the operation, I re-evaluated my entire life. I thought about everything I had done, pondered on everything I still wanted to do, and gradually realized how amazingly lucky I was to be getting a second chance at life when by all accounts, I should have been dead. I never once thought of quitting racing.

I’d never really believed there was a God and the crash didn’t change my mind. If there was a God, why would he have allowed my father to die in my arms when I was just 17? Why would he have allowed my kid brother to be killed racing a bike when he was only 19? Why, after my mother had lost her husband and son within three years of each other, would he then pair her off with an abusive second husband who battered her regularly? Why would he have allowed a good friend of mine to be beaten to death outside a chip shop because he refused to give his chicken and chips to a gang of thugs? No, I was pretty sure God didn’t exist or if He did, I didn’t like His way of doing things.

I also thought of how many of my friends and racing colleagues had been killed in racing accidents over the years while my own life had been spared so miraculously. The list makes for grim and depressive reading: names such as Joey Dunlop, Phil Mellor, Steve Henshaw, Ray Swann, Kenny Irons, Sam McClements, Simon Beck, Lee Pullan, Colin Gable, Gene McDonnell, Mark Farmer, Robert Holden, Klaus Klein, Donny Robinson, Neil Robinson, Steve Ward and Mick Lofthouse. I could go on but it’s not something I like to dwell on. We’re all going to die if we live long enough and I became more hardened to death than most people after losing my father and brother, so racing deaths never bothered me as much as they might have done.

But each and every one of those riders chose to dedicate his life to the sport of motorcycle racing because he loved it. It’s a sport that delivers thrills like no other but also one that punishes mistakes more harshly and more violently than any other. The risks are multiplied 10-fold when a rider also decides to race on closed public road tracks like the notorious Isle of Man TT. It is undoubtedly the most dangerous racing event in the world, but it’s also the event where I made my name and where I enjoyed so many great victories.

Since its inception in 1907, over 170 riders have been killed at the TT and the list is added to almost every year. Some years, as many as five riders are killed in the two-week event. Yet I won there 11 times at speeds which no one had ever witnessed before. Racing between walls and houses at over 190mph and averaging over 120mph for a lap was an awesome rush even if it was highly dangerous. But I cheated death on the world’s most unforgiving racetrack for 10 years and was never even hurt once while racing there. Ironically, it was a so-called ‘safe’, purpose-built short circuit that nearly claimed my life and almost left my mother with no sons at all.

I pondered on all these things as I awaited my operation and repeatedly questioned why I still wanted to race motorbikes more than anything else in my life. It certainly wasn’t for the financial rewards since I haven’t made any serious money from racing even though I’ve raced for more than 20 years. The truth is that when I retire I’ll have to get a normal job like everybody else because I have no savings worth talking about. Some racers, like my former team-mate, Carl Fogarty, have become millionaires from the sport but I’ve been financially naive throughout my career and consequently never got the rewards I feel I deserve.

Having said that, racing at least gives me some sort of wage to live on from day to day, so I suppose money was one of the reasons I had to get back on a bike again. After all, I have two small sons to support with no other obvious means of earning cash to feed and clothe them. But more than anything I wanted to get back on a bike again because I desperately wanted to win the British Superbike championship – the toughest domestic race series in the world.

Throughout my career people have always thought I could only win on dangerous street circuits and couldn’t adapt my style to the short sprint, purpose-built tracks, which require a different and more aggressive riding style. Even when I won the 250cc British championship in 1990 on short circuits people said I just got lucky, so the ‘road racer’ tag still weighed heavily round my neck.

In 1995 I won the British Superbike series but this time pundits said it was only because my arch-rival Jamie Whitham developed cancer midway through the season. It seemed as if nothing I did was enough to convince people that I was a world class short-circuit rider who could hold his own against the best in the world.

After winning that title in ’95 I had seven years of bad luck in the BSB series. Two of my teams folded mid-season through lack of funds, two other teams sacked me for ‘under performing’ and I didn’t complete three seasons because of injury. So, more than anything, I wanted to come back from my injuries this time and win the British title so convincingly that no one could ever have any more doubts about my ability on a motorcycle.

I don’t mind admitting that I was absolutely shitting myself going into that operation. Motorcycle racing may be dangerous but at least I was always the one in control: I could back off the throttle or slam on the brakes if things got too hot or I could even pull off the track and quit if I was totally unhappy about something. There was at least some sense of being in charge even if it was only a delusion. But being knocked out and having someone, however well qualified, operating on your spine? That’s really scary.

Lower spine operations are quite common and generally successful but the neck is a different matter. From the chest upwards, it’s like a bloody telephone exchange inside your body with all those nerves criss-crossing each other and that’s where things can go wrong. As I’ve said, my biggest fear is being paralysed so if the surgeons were going to mess up, I’d rather they just put me to sleep for good.

You’d think that for an operation on your neck, the surgeons would go in from the back, but in my case at least, they didn’t. Instead, they cut open my throat, pushed my windpipe aside and went to work from there. They picked out all the shattered pieces of bone and generally cleaned up the mess, then they cut open my hip and chipped a disc of bone from my pelvis to graft into my neck. I swear they must have used a bloody sledgehammer to chip that bone off because the pain in my pelvis when I woke up was like nothing on earth and I’ve had my share of serious injuries so I’m well accustomed to pain.

As you’d expect, I was also pretty groggy when I woke up and I remember wondering why the fuck there was a red Christmas tree bulb hanging out of my pelvis and one hanging out of my neck too. As I came a bit more to my senses I realized they were blood drains – little suction pumps that suck out any surplus blood so it doesn’t start congealing. My neck and throat felt OK but that bloody hip was unbelievable and when Ian wanted me on my feet the morning after the operation I was horrified. Man that hurt.

Anyway, normally that procedure would have been enough and any other patient would be told to take it easy for a while until the bone healed itself. But because my surgeon knew I wanted to go racing again as soon as possible, he strengthened my neck by screwing in a titanium plate which I still have in there – and always will have as a matter of fact.

A CT scan showed the operation had gone well and my neck was stable and I was on my way home two days later, but I’d been told there was no guarantee that I’d ever get any feeling or strength back in my left arm. Ian said it might return in six weeks, six months, one year or perhaps never at all. I had almost torn that nerve clean out of the spinal column as my body was twisted in the crash and no one could tell if my arm would ever be anything more than the relatively lifeless object that was dangling by my side. I was at nature’s mercy.