Guy Martin is sitting in an old blacksmith’s cottage in Lincolnshire, a bespoke, half-built motorcycle shrinking the room, Pulp Fiction stills on the wall. “The buzz from that was just unbeatable,” he says of the moment between crashing and almost dying. “That’s raised the benchmark. I want to get back to that point. Money can’t buy it.”
This is neither casual machismo nor reckless abandon. Martin is a TT motorcycle racer and, with legs still splattered with mud from an evening’s mountain biking, a master of articulating the thrill of a sporting throwback.
When Martin suffered his “big slide” at last year’s TT races, breaking his back in three places, puncturing a lung and cracking six ribs, one of the first riders on the scene was Conor Cummins. “There was debris everywhere and a huge plume of smoke,” Cummins recalls. “Guy was still lying in the road. I pulled up with four other riders. We were downbeat. All thinking the same thing. And then you carry on.”
When the race was restarted Cummins hit the lead but flew off “the Verandah”, falling down the mountain and clearing a drystone wall in a field. “The wall was a good 200 yards from the road and the crash took four seconds,” he says. His injuries were horrendous — five broken vertebrae, fractures to his pelvis, arm and scapula, knee tendons torn asunder, nerve damage to his hand. The mental damage was just as debilitating. “I’d never experienced it before but I know what it is to be depressed,” he says.
When he was flown home after four operations in Liverpool, a sense of human frailty surfaced. “I don’t care how this comes across, but as soon as the plane took off, it all came flooding out of me,” he says. “I bawled my eyes out.”
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He is sitting in an Italian restaurant in Douglas on the Isle of Man seafront, nursing leftover calzone and taking a call on his mobile. “That was my surgeon,” he says. “He’s given me the all-clear.”
The next morning he heads for Spain and his first time back on a race bike since his fall eight months ago. Thus begins what promises to be one of sport’s most astonishing comebacks.
The TT may be the most dangerous of sporting events, with riders racing motorcycles around 37 miles of country lanes, lined by walls, houses and mountain drops, but it is sport distilled to its purest form.
Martin and Cummins are the last of sport’s working-class heroes — although financially secure, the former still works as a mechanic because “why wouldn’t I?” They do not play for riches or fame but a need to test themselves, and if that brings them in contact with what Martin terms “that near-death thing”, then it is a life-affirming rush bereft of vanity, greed and hubris.
Now the last great race is celebrated in a documentary that brilliantly realises that attraction. TT3D: Closer to the Edge will be released nationwide next month and, far from being a run-of-the-mill history, it is an astute study of sporting motivation. Martin, whose affable eccentricities have landed him his own primetime BBC show, and Cummins, the Manx boy raised on TT folklore, are the key protagonists.
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Back in the blacksmith’s cottage, Martin makes another cup of tea, talks of his plans to visit Cuba because of his interest in communism, and gets back to the basics. “Everything’s been so sanitised with PC nonsense and health and safety that there’s nothing else, is there?” he says. “If it was dead safe, I wouldn’t do it. I do get off on the pain.
“I look back on my crash and, yeah, it did hurt. I had to dig my teeth out of my nose. My chest was caving in and they put this drain in, threaded it through so you could feel it moving around your innards.”
His friend, Martin Finnegan, was killed racing on roads in 2008. “I went to his wedding the previous year, but I didn’t go to the funeral,” he says. “I should have been there but I’m selfish. You have to be. I knew if I went it would affect my racing. I’m not afraid of killing myself, but there are bits you have to put out of your mind.”
Aged 29, Martin has nine TT podium finishes — Cummins, only 24, has three. Neither has won a race there. Martin, who has signed for the successful TAS Suzuki team, has a good chance of breaking his duck in June.
Meanwhile, Cummins, who has two metal rods in his back, cannot be underestimated after belittling his battered body with a humbling courage.
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“It hit home when the surgeon came round with the consent forms,” he says of his accident. “He told me he needed to tell me the risks. I thought, ‘Brace yourself.’ One was blindness, one was paralysis and the last was mortality. I thought, ‘For crying out loud.’ ” He signed up.
“It made me appreciate how great people are. But I was drugged up to the eyeballs and couldn’t sleep. I had to go to the toilet in the bed. There was no dignity. I needed the nurse to come and roll me in the night.”
He remained in hospital on the Isle of Man for two months. “I could not stand for ten seconds and, when I could, I was sick and dizzy,” he says. “I was totally demoralised. I was a wreck.
“I got out of hospital and started thinking about doing other things, an apprenticeship. Then I was sat at home with my sister, and I was suddenly overcome with emotion. I started crying. Maybe there was a hint of depression still there. I was all over the show.”
It was seeing his father ride in the Manx Grand Prix last August that convinced Cummins that he needed to race again. And so from the smelting pot of TT myth and reality came renewed craving. “I am Manx born and bred and still live 500 yards from the track,” he says. “As a boy I’d set my alarm for 5am for practice. I’d be out there, freezing my nads off, snot on my face, waiting for my hero, Joey Dunlop.
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“These guys were gods. You live here and you have to be involved with the TT. It’s such a small place, not even a drop in the ocean, yet the enormity of what goes on here . . .”
Each TT rookie must do the newcomers’ lap behind a marshal. Cummins did his in 2006. “I know a few lads who have come to the mountain climb and they have a lump in their throat,” he says. “It’s a pure emotional experience. The quiet. The wind whistling past your helmet. I fell for it big time. I was in love. I thought, ‘I’m going to do this until I win it.’ ”
Cummins and Martin are bonded by broken backs, and having broken the back of ordinary fear, Martin says he would leave the TT behind if he could win two races in one festival week, but would struggle to fill the void and hates the indulgences of modern sport.
“I think some people have forgotten we go racing because we love it,” he says. “They see glamour. That’s why we had retro black leathers last year. No fancy-named sponsors. If I’d just wanted to stand out, I’d have painted the bike salmon pink with a dysentery brown stripe; it was about making people remember why we are here. I want to go to the grave having won one; I’m not bothered about all the s*** that comes with it.”
Last week, two months after losing his crutches, Cummins completed his landmark test at Cartegena on his Blackhorse Kawasaki. Like Martin, he plans to go track racing this year, too, but their hearts are on the long and winding roads.
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“Fate is a difficult thing to describe,” Cummins says. “If your number’s up, your number’s up, but I don’t want to get to 60 and be a crooked old bugger.”
Long and winding road
1907 First race held
38.21 Average mph of Charles Collier, the winner
131.58 Average mph of John McGuinness on lap record in 2009
26 Record number of wins by Joey Dunlop between 1977 and 2000
5 Record number of wins at a single TT meeting, by Ian Hutchinson in 2010
231 Riders killed during TT races
1977 Year stripped of World Championship status
Words by Rick Broadbent