“I RACED HARDLINE WITH A BROKEN FEMUR. . . AND I LOVED IT! ”
Gee Atherton tells us how he recovered from a near-fatal crash on ‘The Knife Edge’ with a little help from Red Bull Hardline
I’m eating an apple and waiting for Gee Atherton to turn up. My laptop pings and GeeMan’s face blinks into life in front of me, five minutes earlier than our scheduled Google Meet. “Sorry, I’m still eating lunch,” I splutter. “No worries, I’ve just had physio, a crumpet and a cup of tea.”
He’s just back from a session at the gym with his long-time strength coach Alan Millway, so I’m guessing he’s had more than a couple of fluffy cakes to keep him going. Gee’s keen to dive straight in and talk about the crash three years ago that almost killed him, though. He rattles off the injuries like most people talk about their shopping. Pints of blood lost, five ribs snapped, two punctured lungs, one broken femur and one compound wrist fracture. “Oh and I fractured my eye socket and blew my face apart,” he says with a grin.
I grin too, and it seems fine today with Gee sitting in his kitchen in Wales, sun coming in the window and dazzling the screen, me tapping away from my bedroom in Sussex. It really wasn’t at the time though? I ask Gee.
“I’m painting it in this light now just because it’s my way of dealing with it. But at the time… yeah it was bad. Worse than I probably realised at the time. I only just survived it really. But you go into these projects, and you know the risks. There’s so much exposure, there’s so much risk when you’re balanced on these edges. There isn’t any room for error and if it does go wrong, it goes wrong seriously, you know? You don’t just break your collarbone or scuff or knee, it’s pretty serious.”
It did go really wrong for Gee on Friday 18 June while filming near Dinas Mawddwy for his latest big-mountain project, The Knife Edge. A three-part series, Gee’s film trio had seen him building and then ticking off some of the gnarliest lines we’ve ever seen, starting with The Ridge Line – ablend of sublime scenery and terrifying jumps – and following up with The Slate Line, where Gee rides about a million miles an hour down a sliding screeslope – one wrong move and he’s over a cliff or sliced in half by a slab of slate. “I love those big mountain projects, I’m hungry to get back to it,” Gee says. The plan is to take the series international now, expanding the project that began as a purely Welsh affair and go in search of bigger mountains, although without perhaps the same kind of hugeconsequences if things go wrong.
TASTE OF FREEDOM
“I can’t wait to take th
