Brutal reality facing every rider at Isle of Man TT

Davy was the boy in primary school with the long hair and the ruddy cheeks. He was a couple of years older than me but he always stood out because we had the same surname. I used to wonder if we were related but we weren't – at least not directly. Perhaps there was a connection somewhere on a twig of the broadest of family trees.

A few years later, Davy was the slightly sullen teenager who, having been asked to work a Friday and Saturday night in the petrol station owned by his mum and dad, would total up my weekend loot (usually a Nougat bar, a packet of crisps and a Texan) before dismissively presenting me with the price on the cash register that only he could see.

Growing up in a small County Down village it was not uncommon for paths to cross in haphazard ways, throwing together people who often had little in common. Playing in the same football team was one of them. Haphazard: the perfect adjective for describing Davy's style of play. Davy liked nothing better than driving quickly to and from games, he would accelerate into the corners on desolate rural B-roads laughing while the rest of us would be clenching seats – and buttocks – as our lives flashed before us. There was nothing (and yet everything) unusual about this type of driving around country roads - but we were all invincible back then and, anyway, Davy liked his motorbikes and he was good at riding them, too, so there was no danger, was there?

Later on in life, Davy lived around the corner from my mum. Sometimes he'd stop and wind down the window for a quick chat. There'd almost always be a good-natured joke or witty aside and then off he'd speed. Sometimes we'd nod over to each other in the pub and there would be a smile or a 'hello Davy'.

Davy was just another face in the village I called home for 30 years before moving to Scotland. There is a tendency towards over-sentimentality when you leave a life behind you. You remember things differently, you recall relationships through a rose-tinted lens. But our lives were not inextricably linked, indeed I'm not sure they ever crossed again once I left for Glasgow in 2003. 

Sometimes my mind drifts and these recollections from another lifetime come floating past on the clouds of a daydream. They are the patchwork of memories that hurtled to the front of my mind when I heard that Davy had been killed at the Isle of Man TT – the third rider of five who would die in that brutal fortnight – almost exactly a year ago. Davy came off his bike at the 27th Milestone of a course that is peppered with walls, hedges, telegraph poles, houses and grass banks – all hazards which make the TT the most dangerous motorsport race in the world. In October the French sidecar passenger Olivier Lavorel succumbed to his injuries and became the sixth person – a grisly, unwanted record – to perish as a result of a crash at the 2022 TT.

This wasn't a birl around the country roads of Saintfield, where we'd made a dash to make a kickoff at whichever football pitch we were headed for. Davy had raced the TT for more than 30 years. At 52, he was as experienced a rider as you're likely to find. Some even said he had become more cautious with age. It was just his turn that day in a sport that does not discriminate, that does not care if you have raised thousands of pounds for cancer charities, or whether you've always got a smile on your face or whether you've been the supportive voice in the paddock – an older hand helping younger riders with their bikes or offering little nuggets of wisdom.

“The Isle of Man TT Races pass on their deepest sympathy to Davy’s partner Trudy, his family, loved ones, and friends,” read a statement on June 6 last year.

Davy was at an age when you would have thought he might have had enough of racing but it was his whole life, his love for the sport reflected in the fact that he did not race for a team but rather as a privateer, entering events at his own expense or through self-negotiated sponsorships. Indeed, he'd walked away from the sport once before only to return after the pandemic because he missed it so much.

There were statements, too, from fellow veterans of the paddock. The most haunting came from Ryan Farquhar, a three-time TT winner, also from Northern Ireland who said: "He had so much experience and had been racing for years. Like a lot of us he probably thought it would never happen to him.”

The death toll last year forced TT organisers to introduce a number of measures they hope will improve safety management at the event and vowed to “learn from each incident”. A digital red flag system was introduced in 2022, which was able to issue a full-course red flag at the touch of a button. That has been expanded in 2023 while a new GPS system will seek to manage situations quicker and more easily. There has been a change to the way riders start races, too.

Davy would no doubt have hated that. He was a purist, as Farquhar noted: "He knew the risks but was prepared to take them because of his love for the sport. He just enjoyed his racing. He rode every size of bike and was an out and out road racer like myself, a genuine privateer.”

An inquest earlier this year heard that Davy's front wheel had slipped as he took the bend just after Guthrie's Memorial on the TT course. He was killed instantly. It was a freak accident. No amount of safety enhancements would have saved him. It was a judgment that laid bare the brutal, life-and-death reality that faces every motorbike rider every single time they pull away from the start line.

God rest you, Davy.