For all those times when you’re having a terrible day and then, at the end of it, you have an epiphany of sorts where you go “This could have been much worse!,” Simon Cowell feels you.
The music mogul and TV personality broke his back in three places last summer, falling off a brand new e-bike he’d just gotten delivered and was about to ride for the first time in his driveway. He later spent nearly six hours in surgery, and then a couple of months bedridden. He is still in rehab and has a titanium rod in his back, but he considers himself “lucky” after all.
Cowell is about to make his return as judge on America’s Got Talent and, to promote it, he stopped by a chat with Kelly Clarkson, on her show. The topic of the bike fall came up first, for the obvious reasons: Cowell really cheated death. He said he’d been getting “stupid” buying all sorts of new e-bikes and trying them out, but this one was his most stupid, since it was more powerful than he could have imagined.
So, when he got on it, it pulled a wheelie, throwing him high in the air. He landed flat on his back and, as he’s said before, he knew right away that he’d broken it. “I was a millimeter away from severing my spine, and that would have been bad,” he tells Kelly. “So I consider myself lucky.”
That’s a valid point: he able to walk again – and even ride e-bikes. He lives and will get to enjoy his life as before, if only with a bit more common sense in the decision-making part of the buying process. He is lucky, alright.
The bike Cowell fell from is the Swind EB-01 from Swindon, a London maker. It’s not road legal and it’s not sold as such. Marketed as the most powerful in the world, it’s a trail bike that packs a 15 kW (20 hp) motor, which 60 times more powerful than anything you can find on road-legal bikes in Europe. Again, as we’ve said before, to hear Simon say he “didn’t know” it was powerful is ridiculous, especially since he admitted after the accident that he hadn’t even bothered to read the owner’s manual for instructions before that first ride.
Some good advice...
If you buy an electric trail bike, read the manual before you ride it for the first time.
I have broken part of my back.
Thank you to everyone for your kind messages.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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