A spectator badly injured by a 100mph rally car has opened his heart about the carnage and told how he made an emotional pilgrimage to the spot where he was nearly killed.
Keith McCleary was watching the Jim Clark event a year ago this month when one of the cars left the road and ploughed into the crowd. Three people died in the tragedy which sent shock waves around the country.
Dad-of-three Keith, 62, has since waged a year-long battle against the crippling injuries he suffered.
He was in a coma for nine days and required nearly five months of intensive treatment after his pelvis was shattered in several places. His ribs and left shoulder were crushed and broken, a lung was punctured and he needed a massive blood transfusion after suffering internal bleeding.
Months of painful physiotherapy have helped him walk again. And the first place he wanted to visit when he got back on his feet was the scene of the accident that almost killed him.
Speaking for the first time about his horror ordeal, he said he needed to make the emotionally-charged visit to the rural road in the Borders where his life was irrevocably changed in a bid to come to terms with the nightmare events that changed his life forever.
Accompanied by his daughter Nicolle, 22, he said the pilgrimage also marked a major milestone in his recovery as he realised just how he lucky he had been, where others had not.
“I felt no pang of angst but just took in the scene where my life changed,” he said on the eve of the accident’s first anniversary. The rally card veered off the road at 100mph and through a hedge into a field to hit me full force.
“I have been very lucky and thank God every day that I survived against amazing odds.”
Keith was standing well back from the rally route when the car swerved off the road.
“God knows how I survived,” he said. “If I had tried to brace myself I may not have lived.”
The weeks after were lost in a blur of heavy sedation as doctors battled to keep him alive. Wife Jenifer who he is now splitting from kept a constant bedside vigil. Surgeons also had to wait for four days to operate as his body was too shattered to withstand surgery.
“I remember nothing of the crash. The last thing I was conscious of was talking to a friend of my son in the field off the road and everything is a black hole of lost time in my life afterwards.
“My son Grant, was at my bedside when I came to and said, ‘Hello, Dad. How are you?’
“I replied I was fine . . . but why was I in hospital?”
Keith did not see the speeding rally car that almost killed him. “I was standing only yards from one of the race marshals on duty at the rally,” he added.
“The ambulance arrived in minutes but I remember nothing of that or of the journey to Borders General Hospital and onwards to the waiting trauma team at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. When I woke nine days later I was paralysed, unable to walk.
“It has taken months and months to learn to walk again and that was achieved only through sheer determination. I’ve had to take every slow step through the pain of the injuries.”
Keith who has to use a wheelchair a lot of the time as he quickly becomes exhausted has amazed doctors with his progress.
“My family had been told to expect the worst,” said the former construction engineer. I was so ill they couldn’t operate for four days because my body wasn’t strong enough to withstand the major surgery needed to repair my crushed pelvis.”
Keith whose love of motorsports was driven by his own career as a rally driver has been unable to work since the accident. However, his colleagues at Lloyd Agricultural Engineers have often visited him to buoy his spirits. But the breakdown of his relationship and the daily struggle with his injuries have, no doubt, severely dented his zest for life.
One encounter helped. Completely by chance Keith, of Gretna, Dumfries and Galloway, met the driver of the car that had been behind the one that hit him.
The rally driver told him: “The last time I saw you, you were under a rally car fighting for your life!”
“That brought it home to me,” Keith said.
He’s also desperate to get back behind the wheel.
“I’d take part in a rally tomorrow if I could. I miss it badly,” added Keith who now plans to live life “with no regrets”.
Keith, who has been driving tractors since he was seven, keeps his pride and joy in his drive a Ford Focus RS sports car.
“I would jump in a rally car and race tomorrow if I could. Nothing would make me give up my love of the sport, but since the accident my life has been on hold.”
The three spectators killed on the Little Swinton section of the route were Iain Provan, 64, his 63-year-old partner Elizabeth Allan, from Barrhead, Renfrewshire, and 71-year-old Leonard Stern of Bearsden, Glasgow.
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