James May, 61, suffers nasty damage after shock bike accident – as stars’ new TV present is thrown into chaos

James May‘s new TV show The Great Explorers has been thrown into chaos after the presenter was injured in a nasty bike accident recently.

The Top Gear star, 61, ‘bust his wrist’ after falling to the floor near Hammersmith Bridge whilst training for a charity bike ride.

As the host takes time to recover from the incident, James said it has ‘badly spoiled’ the progress of his latest TV gig.

Sharing a health update, James told the Telegraph: ‘At my age, this sort of thing takes much longer to heal. 

‘I woke up one day and the one thing I never thought would happen had happened: I felt old. It’s partly my hair; my baggy face.’

Last week, James told fans he was still suffering with the injury and had to drive his car on the charity bike ride instead of take part.

He told followers on X: ‘I’m taking part in a charity bicycle ride today, with the Armonico Consort and me old mate Oz Clarke (OBE). 

‘But I’m going in the car, because I bust my wrist in a bicycle accident.’

Living in the fast lane has taking its toll on James and his former co-stars Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond.

The trio rose to fame living fast and free testing out supercars, performing stunts, and going on whimsical trips on Top Gear. 

But the battering their bodies have taken is starting to catch up on them after 12 years on the BBC‘s once flagship motoring programme, followed by 46 episodes of their popular Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour.

James, Richard and Jeremy have all in recent years opened up to varying degrees about their health struggles. 

James is three years Jeremy’s junior but he as recently as September admitted his time on the road had left him feeling ‘old and frail’. 

Jeremy, too, said he felt ‘too old and fat’ to carry on.  

James told GB News that his health played a part in him calling time on The Grand Tour as he realised his body couldn’t take any more of the stress that had been exerted on it over the last two decades. 

‘I won’t really miss the stress of it because I’m old now and a bit frail compared with back then [when we started],’ James said. 

‘In the end, we got to the point where we said, “No, we must stop whilst we’re still vaguely ahead. We mustn’t keep going until we embarrass ourselves”,’ he added.

‘I’ve always said if it ends tomorrow, which it nearly did at one point, that I should just be grateful that I had the opportunity.’

In 2019, James told The Sun that he wanted to stop soon because he didn’t want to ‘fall apart’ in the public glare.

He said: ‘How do I feel about ageing? Bad. I’m in the second half of my fifties now and in all honesty, I’m slightly falling apart. 

‘I’m developing nervous disorders and aches and I don’t think I’ll do this much longer because I don’t want to fall apart in public.

‘It would just be a bit undignified and I don’t think people want to see it.’

Most recent of those was Jeremy, 64, who this week revealed he was ‘maybe’ days from death before he earlier this week underwent emergency heart surgery.

He looked weary in an Instagram post two days ago with the scars from his two hours on the operating table seemingly visible by what appeared to be a surgical plaster on his wrist. 

Although he didn’t need a heart bypass, the health scare has been enough to shock meat-eater Clarkson into rethinking his diet as he contemplates ways to ‘make celery interesting’. 

The deterioration, he said, was ‘sudden’ after a short swim in the Indian Ocean towards a beach on a ‘small island’ left him feeling ‘mostly dead’. 

The demise in his health gathered pace upon his return to Britain when he began to feel ‘clammy’, ‘tightness in my chest’, and ‘pins and needles in my left arm’. 

The recent tragic death of Alex Salmond from a massive heart attack was in the forefront of Clarkson’s mind and he knew he needed to see a GP. 

That day he was taken by ambulance to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, home to a £29million heart specialist centre.

He said he then went to an ‘operating theatre’ on Wednesday, after further checks, and doctors said he was perhaps ‘days away’ from death.

Once there he was fitted with a stent to his hold his arteries open, to improve blood flow to his heart and relieve his chest pain.

A stent is a wire mesh tube that props open arteries. To open the narrowed artery, the surgeon may perform what’s known as an angioplasty.

This involves making a small incision in a patient’s arm or leg, through which a wire with an attached deflated balloon is thread through up to the coronary arteries

Describing what he called the ‘wearisome effects of growing old’, Jeremy said: ‘It seems that of the arteries feeding my heart with nourishing blood, one was completely blocked and the second of three was heading that way.’

He said a stent, which can save lives and stop future heart attacks through improving blood flow to the heart, was fitted in around two hours.

The motoring journalist said: ‘It wasn’t especially painful. Just odd,’ and added that he has been thinking: ‘Crikey, that was close.’

As for Richard, he is still feeling the lasting effects from his horrific 319mph crash in 2006 filming a Top Gear stunt. 

Richard, 54, was put in a coma for two weeks after the near-fatal crash and suffered serious injuries, including a frontal lobe brain injury. 

This year he told The Sunday Times in a candid interview that  his memory was ‘getting shaky.

Richard has also raised fears that his injuries might have caused onset dementia.

Talking on The Diary of a CEO podcast, he said: ‘I worry about my memory because it’s not brilliant. I can still read a script and deliver it but my long-term memory is not brilliant.

‘I have to write things down and work hard to remember them sometimes. It might be the age, it might be the onset of something else, I worry about that. I do, I do.

‘I should probably have a look and find out, because I do.’

Host Steven Bartlett asked him: ‘Are you scared of finding out?’

He said: ‘I am because it was a bleed on the front. It could mean there is an increased risk. I need to find out. I’ve been too scared to do it. I need to do it.

‘Weirdly on the way here, I had to stop off for a medical for a production. They ask “Have you been involved in any accidents?” I’m like “Woooah! Can I have another piece of paper please?”

‘I need to book myself in for one of those mid-life MOTs and check everything. I wanted to ask them to check there is nothing going awry up here [pointing to his head]. But I chickened out. Didn’t.

‘That means I probably need an MRI scan but at 53, your memory does start to get a bit… they call it lost key syndrome.

‘I am quite forgetful, generally thinking about something else, the next thing and therefore I do drop the ball, I forget stuff a lot. That’s just me. That’s who I am.’

In 2017, Hammond was involved in a second crash and was airlifted to hospital in Switzerland while filming Amazon’s The Grand Tour.

The accident took place in the town of St Gallen in north-east Switzerland. Richard had to be pulled from the wreckage of a Rimac supercar worth £2m that later burst into flames.

And during his latest interview, Richard also spoke about health anxiety.

He said: ‘It’s not surprising that we don’t want to face it. I do practice a bit of mindfulness and as you get older, talking about it makes it easier.

‘You don’t have to imagine a world without you in it because you wont be in it.’

And speaking about the aftermath of the crash, Richard said: ‘ I had very bad post traumatic amnesia for weeks

‘Like a one-minute memory. Mindy my wife said I was the nicest I had ever been. Lovely apparently.

‘I was perfectly happy reading the same newspaper every single day several times a day until Mindy took it away because she was sick of seeing me read it.

‘If someone is in that confused state for whatever reason, if they are happy, they are happy. All you’ve got to do is cope to support them in that. It doesn’t matter if they cant remember who you are. And I was.’

Meanwhile, Freddie Flintoff was involved in a horrific crash on Top Gear in 2022, which left him with severe facial injuries and taking time away from the spotlight to recover.

The sports star crashed in a open-topped three-wheel 130mph Morgan Super 3 car, which had no air bags, leaving him with severe facial injuries and several broken ribs.

Immediately following the accident he was faced with an ‘agonising’ 45 minute wait for the air ambulance to arrive and rush him to hospital, with the BBC later giving the presenter an apology.

Filming on Top Gear was suspended and the future of the show – which he co-hosted alongside comedian Paddy McGuinness and Chris Harris- remains in question after it was put on indefinite hiatus last November.

And Freddie himself remained out of the public eye for months as he recovered from the accident, after his devoted wife Rachael, 42, reportedly ‘begged’ him to stay off work and take time to recover.

He is believed to have secured a £9million compensation payout from the BBC following the accident. The broadcaster also made an apology to the cricketer.

However, the BBC brought him back for the new series of Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, which saw him take a group of youngsters on a cricket tour to India.