Freddie Flintoff recovering in hospital following accident filming Top Gear
Injuries 'not life threatening'
The television presenter and former cricketer Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff is recovering in hospital following an accident while filming a segment for the BBC motoring series Top Gear.
Flintoff, 45, was airlifted to hospital on Tuesday (December 13) after the incident at Top Gear’s Dunsfold Park test track in Surrey, having received medical treatment at the scene.
While his injuries are understood not to be life-threatening, few details have yet emerged about their full extent or to what exactly happened, though the BBC has said that the accident did not occur at high speed.
“Freddie was injured in an accident at the Top Gear test track this morning — with crew medics attending the scene immediately,” a BBC spokesperson said.
“He has been taken to hospital for further treatment and we will confirm more details in due course.”
Tuesday’s incident isn’t the first time that the former England cricket captain has been injured while working on Top Gear, which he joined in 2019.
In his first year on the show, Flintoff lost control of a motorised trike — nicknamed the Time Bandit — at 124mph while taking part in a drag race with his co-hosts Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness.
The incident occurred at Elvington Airfield in Yorkshire, the same location where the former Top Gear presenter (and now co-host of Amazon’s The Grand Tour) Richard Hammond was seriously hurt in 2006, when the jet-powered dragster he was piloting flipped over at 288mph. That incident left Hammond in a coma for several weeks and resulted in sustained issues related to the impact on his brain.
Flintoff escaped uninjured from his own crash at Elvington, saying afterwards:
“I go to great lengths to make sure I do well in Top Gear drag races but on this occasion I went a few lengths too far! It will look more ridiculous than dangerous when you see it on TV.”
He crashed again in 2019 when he hit a market stall in Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, also while filming Top Gear.
Flintoff also crashed a rally car while filming sports gameshow A League of Their Own.
Flintoff retired from international cricket in 2009 having played for England in 79 tests, 141 one-day internationals, seven T20s and having played a key role in the team’s Ashes successes in 2005 and 2009.
After a single professional bout as a boxer, he has forged a highly-successful career as a television personality, having appeared as a contestant on the Australian version of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! on which he was crowned “king of the jungle”.
He took to acting, too — appearing in the BBC drama Love, Lies and Records in 2017 — as well as singing, making an appearance in Fat Friends The Musical.
Flintoff has also presented several documentaries including Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams for the BBC, as well as a 2020 film in which he laid bare his 20-year struggle with the eating disorder bulimia.
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