By the time you read this, two-time DH world champ Gee Atherton should have hit the gnarly slopes of Utah for his third crack at the Red Bull Rampage title. But the middle Atherton sibling’s scariest moment happened much closer to home, on a remote Welsh ridge in June 2021 – and almost cost him his life
Words Steve Thomas Illustration Kevin February
My SCARIEST Moment
“The Knife Edge [the follow-up to Gee’s 2020 video, The Ridge] was a hard project to film, but we managed it and I couldn’t believe how well we’d done. Then, literally during the last shot of the final day, I dropped in, landed awkwardly and got kicked off this ridge. As I rag-dolled downhill for a few hundred feet, my body got pretty badly busted up. I landed in a heap at the bottom, in a bit of a state.
“I remember coming around and knowing that it was serious, and not just your average, run-of-the-mill crash. To make matters worse, I’d landed in a pretty inaccessible location. It was steep, difficult to get to and was going to take a complex extraction process to get me out of there. Plus, we were fighting against the clock – I was bleeding a lot, there were some bad bone breaks and my body was clearly not stable, so I needed medical help as soon as possible.
“As I drifted in and out of consciousness, the guys were doing a great job of trying to stabilise me. I was losing a lot of blood and struggling to get oxygen, and they managed to get Mountain Rescue to send a helic
