6:10pm Friday 19th March 2010
By Chris Flanagan
TWELVE months ago, Neil Hodgson lay helpless on a remote Californian race track.
He had broken all of his ribs, punctured a lung and sustained horrific injuries to his left arm.
He feared it could be the end, not just of a glittering Superbike career, but of life itself.
But the Burnley rider is back – back on the bike, and back in the British Superbike Championship after 10 years away.
At the age of 36, Hodgson will make his debut for the Motorpoint Yamaha team at Brands Hatch in two weeks’ time.
By swapping the impossibly sunny Laguna Beach for England, though, he knows the main goal of his five-year American adventure has passed him by.
British champion in 2000 and world champion three years later, Hodgson had aimed to be the first person to claim a unique treble with victory in the American Superbike Championship.
After a frustrating period – he came sixth, fifth and sixth in his three full seasons in the States, having endured a nightmare 2007 when his team withdrew on the eve of the campaign – he thought the chance to win the title had finally come last year.
Then came the accident.
“I finished second in the first race and I had been fastest in testing,” Hodgson recalled.
“I thought, ‘This is the one, this is the year I’m going to crack America’.
“It’s pretty much exactly a year ago when I crashed.
“I was doing some training on my motocross bike. I collided with a friend while I was going over this big jump.
“I landed really badly on my arm. I broke every rib and collapsed my lung.
“I dislocated my arm and then pulled all the major tendons off. My arm was flopped around my back, not attached in any way, just by the skin.
“I thought that was the end of my career to be honest. I was just lying on the floor thinking, ‘This is the big one, I’ve expected this for a while’.
“It’s the first time I’ve been really frightened. Normally, no matter how heavily you crash, and I’ve broken plenty of bones, there’s some strange mechanism that you just get up, even if I’ve broken arms or legs.
“This was the only time I’ve not been able to move. I was struggling to breathe because of my collapsed lung and I was starting to worry because I knew I was in the middle of nowhere.
“You don’t know if you’ve got internal bleeding. You don’t know if you’re going to die.”
Hodgson was airlifted to hospital and after several operations he was able to return to health – even if he admits his shoulder is still weak.
His American dream died that day, but he still has his sights set on a fitting end to his career.
“I’d become a bit disillusioned with the whole American thing,” he said.
“I missed home. I’ve not got many years left in racing, so I want to make sure I enjoy it now.
“Goal number one is to try to win the championship.
“I don’t know how feasible that is, but we’re going to do everything we can.
“Testing went really well.
“If somebody had said to me 10 years ago I’d be world champion, I’d have assumed that would have been enough.
“But it’s never enough. You always want to win again. It’s a drug.
“For me winning the championship would be the fairytale end.”
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