Simon Cowell says he came perilously close to not being able to walk after a 2020 e-bike accident — and that the wreck left him drifting in and out of consciousness.
“I knew I’d broken my back the minute I landed,” Cowell told his ex-girlfriend Terri Seymour on “Extra,” according to the UK’s Daily Mail. “It was really, really kind of sudden and it hurt.
“It could have been a lot worse,” he added. “When I saw the X-ray, I really nearly could have smashed my spine to pieces, so I literally wouldn’t have been able to walk.”
Ever the Type A personality, Cowell says he remembered thinking, “‘You’re not supposed to move,’ but, that wasn’t the ‘X Factor’ boss thought process at the time.”
Rather, he thought, “I’ve got to get back into the house because I can’t lie there,” and he kept losing consciousness after he’d been carried to the house.
Cowell underwent a six-hour surgery immediately, and a friend told The Sun that being laid up was its own kind of torment for the go-go-go TV personality.
“Naturally, he thought he’d be out of action for a few weeks and then, if not doing Ironman contests, at least be back on the showbiz circuit,” the friend said. “Instead, he’s had a setback from surgery to fuse two vertebrae and it has proven more complicated than a standard break.”
But Cowell, 61, is also singing the praises of his girlfriend Lauren Silverman, 43, and son Eric, 7 — who started calling Cowell “Iron Man” when he saw his dad’s post-surgery screws and rods in his back.
“Both [Silverman] and Eric, they were like my support. I couldn’t have gotten through it without them, so we got closer,” he said.
Cowell vowed to come back from his injury “fitter than I was before I had the accident, saying “I’ve never been in this situation in my life where you literally can’t move. The pain was off the charts.”
Sure enough, he began walking 10,000 steps a day for his recovery, adding swimming to that regimen when he was able.
The “X Factor” honcho is also said to be pondering a lawsuit against Swind, the company behind the e-bike Cowell was flung from.