Still dicing with death aged 50
150 riders have lost their lives, but John McGuinness starts his 100th Isle of Man TT today happy to be...
‘The course is 38 miles. Bits of it are scary, scary’
THEY are back at the island, doing their magnificent and mad thing. We don’t quite get it, because how could we, but to them there is no greater expression of free will than a 200mph dance between solid stone walls on the Isle of Man.
And so to the oldest throttler in town, John McGuinness: the greatest rider of these roads among the living and second if you count the lost.
McGuinness is 50 now, a Morecambe lad who need never buy his own beer on the island, and he has a way of describing the bike game and its everloaded question of why. It always comes back to the ‘why’ when eyes from the outside look at the Isle of Man TT, arguably the most dangerous gig in all of sport.
It gets going today, back after two years lost to Covid, and McGuinness is doing what he would normally avoid, which is to think on the fragility of it all. What he says might well speak for a chunk of the 155 riders from far and wide who have descended on a little island in the Irish Sea.
‘The last two months I put two mates in the ground — one had cancer and one had a brain haemorrhage at 52,’ McGuinness tells Sportsmail. ‘That is two years from where I am now. You know what, I would sooner have 50 great years than 60 s***e years if that makes sense.
‘I love racing those bikes. I look a bit tired and saggy but the old fire burns. There are lots of ways to live a life.’
And when it is put like that, what else is there to say? Plenty, actually, but that will come shortly.
Today is a big one for McGuinness. It will be his 100th start at the TT, after 99 in which he has 47 podiums and 23 race wins, just shy of the record 26 held by Joey Dunlop, who died on his bike in 2000.
For an unvarnished gem of a guy — the sort who discusses the mechanical inequalities of motor racing by saying ‘you have to p*** with the d*** you’re given’ — McGuinness is feeling more emotional than usual about bringing up his century. ‘I never thought I’d get to 100,’ he says. ‘You know, I first came here when I was 10 to watch my dad. Something was injected in my body that day that said I was going to do the TT.
‘The sport just gets under your skin. There probably isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the TT. It is a way of life.’
Maybe he will catch Dunlop, but that’s possibly veering too far towards the fanciful. Even McGuinness isn’t making those noises.
‘I have to say with my Honda hat on that I am still capable of winning but the reality of it might be not,’ he says. ‘If I am third I am third, sixth is sixth. If I am feeling it I will still stick my neck out a bit but hopefully I know my limitations.’
And that there is the key, which takes us from the why to the how.
Specifically, how these riders can do what they do in graphic knowledge of what can go wrong. Does any sporting arena remind its competitors of what is at stake quite so often as the TT?
It was Thursday morning when we had this chat; the previous evening a 29-year-old Welsh rider called Mark Purslow became the 150th to die while competing or qualifying since the TT’s inception in 1907.
Perhaps that is the TT in its nutshell — nothing in sport can give or take so much from its heroes. And few have a wider perspective than McGuinness, a former brickie and cockle-picker who has gone on to see the lot.
He has straddled eras of his sport, received an MBE, and could march sheep through Morecambe if he chose. He has also snapped his back, manipulated a mangled leg with a spanner and was first on the scene when a close friend, David Jefferies, went down for the last time.
Purslow’s death has triggered the kind of psychological contortions that would be unnecessary in almost any other sport. ‘You have a weird inner feeling and you just have to shove it to the back of your head,’ McGuinness says.
‘It is a different community. We are different people. We all go forward from it (Purslow’s death) because we know he was doing what he loved doing. No one had a gun to his head.’
It might sound cold but only because it serves as a defence mechanism. ‘I remember 2003,’ says McGuinness. He is talking about his great mate Jefferies, a nine-time winner at the TT until it all ended during practice one Thursday, as he rounded the shallow left-hander at Crosby.
You can hit 160mph by there but it is not known exactly how quickly he hit the wall of No29 Woodlea Villas. McGuinness was first to witness the carnage.
‘It still holds me to this day,’ he says. ‘His mother was the strongest person here and afterwards she told me to stop being soft and get back on the bike — it is what he would have wanted. We do what we do.’
Naturally there are those who would rather not frame the TT around its worst consequences. And yet it is also the sharpest way to contextualise the remarkable work these riders do.
‘My mum’s advice has always been, “Don’t go too fast but make sure you win”,’ he adds. ‘Go figure that one out.’
His career would suggest he followed at least some of her instruction, with his first TT win coming 23 years ago. ‘I can barely remember it,’ he says. ‘I just remember we got steaming in the bar that night which would be frowned on these days.
‘My favourite time here was 2007, that was special. It was the centenary, the bike was epic, sun shining — no better feeling. It is hard to describe to someone who has never done it, riding this course. It’s 38 miles and bits are just scary, scary. It takes years to learn. That year I was on the rostrum every race and then won the Senior (the blue-riband event). Really cool.’
His knocks along the way have been hard, from the barbs of folk who doubted this burly racer could ever be great, to the falls. The worst of those came in 2017 at the North West 200 in Northern Ireland, where he broke his back and suffered a compound fracture of his right leg.
‘I lost 52mm from my leg,’ he says. ‘They put it in a (fixator) cage and I had to grow it back 1mm a day, so I had to keep using a spanner to unlock the brace every day so it would grow. It wasn’t fun. Even when you get your leg over the missus you would boot her in the shin with a 5kg cage on your leg.’
McGuinness can laugh about it now. He won’t say how many more miles it will take for him to call it a day, but there are still goals.
‘A podium this week would be amazing,’ he says. ‘I have a deal with my team that if I get a podium I will do a nude streak down the prom. If I can do that streak and get on the ferry next Friday, that would be the icing on the cake.’
• HIGHLIGHTS on ITV4 each day of race week — tonight 9pm.
‘I’ve got a deal with my team. If I get a podium place, I’ll streak down the promenade!’