WORDS HANNAH PHOTOGRAPHY MARK AND AS CREDITED
“I love waking up in the mornings.” It’s taken stunt rider Jez Avery a long while to be able to say this, because behind the showman front he’s been dogged – “tortured” he says – by mental ill health. If you’re of a certain age, there’s a good chance you had a poster of Jez on your wall. Somersaulting into a harbour, leaping over a row of cars, or otherwise improbably balancing on a mountain bike, he was a wellknown face in magazines and on the mountain bike events circuit throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, at last year’s Malverns revival, he was one of those fixtures that needed to be there to make it feel right. But he nearly didn’t make the Malverns in summer 2018 at all – in winter 2017 he made plans to end his life.
Sitting in a farmhouse in the Peak District, we’re 12 months on from when Jez thinks he started to see a life ahead of him once more. It’s a life he says is dependent on a cocktail of drugs, but it’s one that he wants, and he hopes that by telling his story, others might also ‘get their lives back’.