Barry Sheene Superstar
It’s now 20 years since Barry Sheene died. Britain still hasn’t had a premier class World Champion, nor any rider who transcended the sport like Number Seven
Larger than life personalities are legion. No more so than now. Larger than death characters much less so. How and why a man who died in 2003 still shines on in the general consciousness is no mystery. Barry Sheene was the right man in the right place at the right time. And he used every means at his disposal to cement his place in the firmament of fame.
Think 1970s and it’s easy to be lured into the notion that the decade following the so-called ‘swinging’ sixties was somehow a flared version of flower power. It was anything but. The sixties, for all but the very fortunate few, were still a drab struggle to put lingering post-war socio-economic horrors to bed. The seventies largely another dose of the same with football or music still one of the few routes out of drudgery for ordinary people.
Motorcycle racing was not big box office. People perhaps knew of ‘Mike the Bike’ Hailwood, but outside of what was perceived as a grubby, oily, down-at-heel version of car racing, motorcycle racing was not even a blip on the wider public’s radar. It all changed when Barry Sheene crashed at the Daytona International Speedway in Florida in 1975.
A Thames Television crew, making a documentary, captured Sheene’s 180mph practice crash when his rear wheel locked up as he rocketed off the banking flat in top. The footage went as viral as 1975 media allowed. It’s a blood-curdling crash by any standards, and yet it’s the recovery scene as he chats and smokes in hospital, nursing a broken femur, broken wrist, arm and collarbone, six ribs, three vertebrae, a split kidney and substantial skin loss, that’s the money shot.
Here is a man who’s narrowly missed the blade of the Grim Reaper’s scythe sitting up smoking and chatting like he’s just got back from a decent night out. Then he was racing again seven weeks later. That sealed it. Sheene knew he was in business as a brand not just a motorcycle racer with talent. There were enough of them.
It took courage to get back so soon, and intelligence to work an opportunity to its fullest extent, yet if there weren’t the personality to back it up – an aura no less, interest would wane. He proved he could walk the walk, fortunately talking the talk he also found easy. “I thought, right,
