Five weeks prior to our cover shoot, Gordon Ramsay was on social media pointing out the damage done to his body when his bike cartwheeled through the air with him attached to it. In the video shared to his millions of TikTok, Instagram and X followers, he can be seen lifting his chef whites to reveal a huge Barney the Dinosaur-coloured bruise covering the entire left side of his stomach, his hand trembling. By all accounts, he’s lucky to be here at all.
Now, all that remains from his accident is a small haematoma, barely visible underneath the shorts, cycling jersey and wetsuit he’s wearing today. That’s perhaps a little surprising given that the cycling jersey in particular is, he says, ‘so fucking tight, you can see my religion’. The vulnerable, shaken man from his crash video has vanished, too. He’s back to his confident, sweary self.
The only concern the 57-year-old has to deal with today is whether he’ll be the oldest guy to grace the cover of Men’s Health. (He’ll be relieved to hear he’s not – Arnie and Samuel L Jackson were both older, 75 and 67 respectively, when they appeared beneath our masthead.) He’s also eager to hear about our recent cover stars. When he learns he’ll be hitting news stands just a couple of months after Adam Peaty – a man who’s currently dating his daughter, Holly Ramsay, and is in Adonis-like shape, he laughs, and his response is perfectly on brand. ‘What the fuck?’
I find training relaxing because it just gets me out of that fast lane
But back to the cycling accident. Though he displayed his injuries to his social media followers, little has been said about what actually happened. Ramsay was galloping down a hill on his bike when his front wheel hit a crater-like pothole. The bike spun 180 degrees and he was catapulted through the air. With hindsight, he can say what he did next was stupid. He tried to put the chain back on and continue riding. But when he came to fix his helmet back into place, he realised it had split completely. Looking back, it was probably the reason he was still alive or, at the very least, why he was still conscious. In that moment, his vision blurred and there was blood everywhere. ‘I honestly thought I was going to pass out,’ he says. Ramsay managed to contact his assistant, Justin Mandel, who got him an ambulance to hospital. CT scans followed; thankfully nothing was broken. He jokingly puts that down to his hardy Scottish bones.
