Apprentice star Claude: I nearly lost my leg in electric bike accident
STAR of The Apprentice Claude Littner has revealed he nearly lost his leg in an e-bike accident.
The 72-year-old sustained such a severe injury that he will not be able to take part in the next series of the BBC reality competition as Lord Sugar’s boardroom side-kick alongside Baroness Brady.
He will have a tenth operation on his leg later this month and will miss filming while he recovers – including learning to walk again. Tim Campbell, who won the first series in 2005, will appear in his place when the show airs in early 2022.
The former business executive said he was ‘pottering along’ on an electric bike near his home in Paddington, central London, in April when he found himself ‘lying on the ground’ with his bone sticking out of his leg. ‘I was on the left hand side of the street, my bike was in the middle of the road and I didn’t know what happened,’ Littner said.
‘I suspect I hit a pothole or something like that, but I must have blanked out at the moment of impact.’
It is not known if he was riding his own bike or an electric hire cycle, which are available in some parts of the capital.
He was taken to St Mary’s Hospital nearby, where surgeons considered amputating his leg – but ultimately managed to save it.
Littner, who was told he had six months to live in 1997 following a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, praised his plastic and orthopaedic surgeons and put his recovery so far down to his ‘absolute determination’.
Last August, music mogul Simon Cowell, 61, was nearly paralysed in an e-bike accident in Los Angeles and underwent a six-and-a-half-hour operation to fuse his broken spine back together.