Crash: The Eddie Kidd Story

Share on Facebook posted 08-10-09 by John Kelly

August 11 marks one of the saddest anniversaries in the history of daredevil bike jumping. It was 13 years ago that the great Eddie Kidd, a multiple world-record jumper and Hollywood stuntman, performed a seemingly easy stunt — if there is such a thing — that left him severely brain-damaged and crippled for life.

Kidd, Great Briton’s greatest stuntman, was an astonishingly beautiful man, both in his appearance and his remarkable level of skill. If the stunt world ever had its own Elvis, it was Eddie. Even his name couldn’t possibly be more fitting. Eddie Kidd. He was literally a kid, 14 years old, when he began his professional career in England in the mid-1970s, a time when many young people in that country were flamboyantly reinventing themselves with cartoon character names like Sid Vicious and Poly Styrene.

And he was, literally, a rock star. He recorded a slew of pop singles and displayed his six-pack stomach, modeling in a famous UK Levi’s jean campaign. In a slew of action flicks, he was the stunt double for many of Hollywood’s most famous actors — Harrison Ford in Hanover Street, Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye, Roger Moore and Michael Caine in Bullseye, Val Kilmer in Top Secrets, and Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights. And there were the television appearances, too many to note here.

In 1978, when he was 20, he starred in the film Riding High, in which he played a delivery boy who challenges a professional daredevil in a dangerous — really dangerous — stunt to jump over a broken bridge. The footage is utterly mind-blowing. “I never want to do a jump like that again,” Eddie said after the fact. And, well, yeah. As you can see from this clip, while he easily cleared the 80-foot gap over a 50-foot sheer drop above a viaduct — on a tiny 400cc Yamaha (!!!) — a strong counterwind nearly knocked him off the landing space and into the concrete walls of the bridge.

What else? Well, how much time do you have? Eddie, the man who was known as the Black Knight because of his wardrobe and fearlessness, jumped over the Great Wall of China on a Harley. He also beat Robbie Knievel in what is considered the word’s greatest daredevil challenge of all time. His cycle records include jumping over 32 cars, 22 cars (riding his motorbike “no hands”), and 13 double-decker buses.

Today, he’s confined to a wheelchair and, according to recent reports, quickly fading, barely able to speak a coherent word. Jumping a motorcycle over cars or canyons, obviously, is not the safest way to make a living. But then again, is it any more dangerous, or crazy, than just driving a cycle down a highway? According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were more than 5,300 motorcycle fatalities in 2008; even more head-spinning is the fact that 80 percent of all cycle accidents result in severe injury or death. By comparison, Eddie Kidd successfully completed more than 3,000 jumps during his career and was never injured once. Until his last jump.

And damn, did that one ever make up for all the near misses. At a Hell’s Angels festival in 1996, Eddie performed a stunt that included jumping over an oncoming car. The jump went off without a hitch, but when he landed, he bounced at the end of the ramp and smacked his head on the cycle’s gas tank. Confused, he slowly drifted toward the edge of the landing area’s embankment before toppling over the ravine, falling 20 feet and landing on his head. He broke nine of his vertebrae and severely destroyed parts of his brain. His family was told he would be in a coma for at least ten years, possibly forever. Two months later, he finally regained consciousness, but spent months in hospital.

In the 13 years since the accident, there have been a few hopeful moments in which it seemed as if he was on his way back to at least some form of recovery. At one point he predicted that by the millennium he would be back on a cycle, and would attempt to jump over one of the Egyptian pyramids. However, recent reports say that his physical and mental conditions are worsening.

In 1999 he told The Sunday Herald that the night before the jump he had gone on a massive alcohol and cocaine binge, leaving him groggy when he woke up that morning. The scaffolding he had asked for, as well as the wall of cardboard boxes which would have broken his fall, were not in place. He decided to go ahead and make the jump anyway.

“I’ve gone over those last few moments time and time again, and I’m convinced that my doped-up head from the night before made me reckless that day,” he said. “I wasn’t right in the head, but I thought I’d get away with it … I thought I was invincible … I know I was a prat.”

It took him three years just to relearn how to enunciate the word “prat.”