Hammond - On The Edge: My Story

Table of Contents

Richard Hammond was born in Birmingham in 1969. After Solihull School he studied photography and television production at art college. He worked for various radio stations including York, Cumbria, Newcastle, Lancashire and Leeds before moving to television. After stints on Skys Men and Motors, Motor Week and Better Cars, he joined the BBC Top Gear team in 2002. His other television work includes presenting four series of Brainiac: Science Abuse for Sky One; Petrolheads, as a team captain; Time Commanders for BBC2; and as the host of Richard Hammonds 5 OClock Show for ITV1. He also presented The Gunpowder Plot: Exploding the Legend, Should I Worry About and Richard Hammond and the Holy Grail for BBC1, and Crufts Dog Show in 2005. He writes a weekly column for the Daily Mirror.

On 20 September 2006, he was critically injured in a car crash while filming for Top Gear at an airfield near York. He made a remarkable recovery and still lives in Gloucestershire with his wife Mindy and their two daughters, Izzy and Willow, four horses, five dogs, three cats, a duck called Slim, several motorcycles, a very old tractor and a large collection of cars.

Mindy Hammond was born in Cheltenham and, when she wasnt doing paper rounds to pay for her riding lessons, she went to the High School for Girls, Gloucester. Moving to London she worked in various offices, which paid for more riding lessons and fed the two big dogs with which she shared her small London flat. At night she wrote novels (still unpublished) and exercised too much. She met Richard in 1995 and together they moved to her home town, where she worked in graduate training. Following the birth of their two daughters she now divides her time between them, a menagerie of pets and livestock and managing Richards increasing workload.

On The Edge

RICHARD HAMMOND

Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

A PHOENIX PAPERBACK

First published in Great Britain in 2007
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This paperback edition published in 2008
by Phoenix
an imprint of Orion Books Ltd,
Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martins Lane
London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette Livre UK company

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Richard Hammond 2007

Photographs Authors Collection: pages 1-8 (all), 9 (bottom), 17 (all),
19 (bottom), 24 (top); BBC Motion Gallery: 14, 15 (all);
BBC Photo Library: 12 (top), 13 (top and the next three clockwise), 24
(bottom); bbctopgear.com: 12 (bottom); Brian Aris: 9 (top), 22-23; ITV plc:
10 (all); Mirrorpix: 11 (all), 16 (top), 18, 19 (top); PA photos: 16 (bottom);
Racelogic Ltd: 20 (inset images); Rex Features: 13 (bottom and middle left);
Top Gear magazine/Engine: 20-21.

The right of Richard Hammond to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 2978 5815 7

www.orionbooks.co.uk

This ebook produced by Jouve, France

Chapter 1

Instinct told me that I was watching one of those things that looked very easy to do but that would, in reality, turn out to be very difficult. My instructor glided across the flat, frozen fields in an effortless sweep; her long, thin skis moving in a languid rhythm, until she seemed to ripple over the snow in a single movement. Bend the knees. You see? Bend, push, bend, push. You must get into a rhythm. Even her voice, with its lilting, Swedish bounce, floated effortlessly across the open space. Her ski poles touched down gently with each stroke to add to the gentle forward propulsion from her skis, her legs worked slower than her progress across the ground, bringing the next ski up to the front to complete the cycle, and there was not a single break in her progress. The whole sequence looked like a piece of slowed-down film. She was demonstrating the classic cross-country-skiing style of her homeland and it looked as though she had spent her whole life doing it.

I knew that my efforts wouldnt look so good. And they didnt; I fell over, of course. I was discovering that cross-country skiing, or langlaufing, isnt just hard to perfect, its almost impossible to get started.

Its mostly about grip, langlaufing, and I couldnt find any. And its about rhythm - I didnt have any; poise - absolutely none; and grace - not a jot. Annoyingly, my first attempts didnt even amount to a hilarious, high-speed crash. I just slithered about for a few seconds, my skis slipping backwards and forwards on the snow-covered grass as I tried to waddle ahead, failing to gain even an inch towards my goal before gravity won and I flopped on to my side and lay there, feet clumsily crossed in their skis, my bedewed nose inches from the frozen ground. But I wasnt learning this just for fun. In three months I would set off to the Magnetic North Pole on these same skis. Yet I couldnt cross a frozen playing field - and this was my third day of trying. I closed my eyes.

It got frightening inside my mind and panic rose in my chest. I was struggling because of the brain-damage. It must be that. Id always been good at things when I tried them for the first time. I mean, yes, after lesson one Id get bored and fall to pieces. But Ive always been good at the lesson one stage. A fast learner with a short attention span - pretty much every school report I have ever had said exactly that. I had a sudden, vivid memory of my first attempt at water-skiing behind a boat on Lake Windermere in the Lake District - when they used to allow such things. I had listened half-heartedly while the bloke droned on about the need to keep your knees together, the dangers of drawing your arms in too close to your body, the need to keep the rope tight, and a thousand other things that I had to know. Eventually I got to give it a go. I slipped into the freezing grey waters of Windermere and grabbed the plastic handle at the end of the blue nylon rope. The boat started to pull away and I was left bobbing around on my own in the green-fringed solitude of a quiet corner of the lake. I thought about old Donald Campbell and his Bluebird speedboat. Hadnt they gone down in Windermere when he tried to break the record for speed on the water? Actually no, that was Coniston. Or was it? And then there was a gentle but firm tug on the rope as the small boat reached the limit of the line extending behind it. I gripped hard, there was a lot of water and splashing, I gripped some more and eventually rose up from the foam like a small, straggly Neptune in a borrowed blue wetsuit. I was water-skiing; it was easy. I got cocky and waved at a boat going the other way. Logic told me that I could shift my weight across the skis to change direction and it worked. Crossing the wake, one of my skis was pulled off by the turbulent water. I shifted over to my right leg and carried on.

My wife, Mindy, can still hardly bear to talk about our first horse-riding trips together. She has been riding all her life. Usual sort of thing; spent half her childhood being shouted at by stern-faced women in polyester body-warmers about her leg position and posture in the saddle, and the other half shovelling out what those same horses she dreamed of riding had left in their stable overnight. Horse-riding is, for her, an art; something to be studied, learned and perfected. She approaches it with the same respect, consideration and, yes, fear, that a test pilot might approach each flight. By contrast, I wandered up to the first nag I was going to throw an inappropriately booted leg over, hopped on board, asked how you steered and braked it, and set off. There was no need to shout at me about leading legs or how I held the reins. I still ride horses in the same way as I did that first time; I get on, pull left to go left and right to go right and make sure I dont fall off. It drives Mindy mad. I have always been like this; I love trying anything new and can usually make a decent go of it the first time I try it. And then, if I have to learn how to do it properly, I get bored and want to do something I know Im already good at.