When Billy Monger signed up to compete in the 2024 Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii, he knew almost nothing about the event. But after a morning genning up on YouTube, the 25-year-old from Surrey was left pretty well traumatised. Straight away, there were the distances involved:
Even the hardiest professional athletes describe Kona as one of the most extreme single-day endurance events in the world. For Monger, who has been a double amputee since losing both legs in a horror motor-racing crash in 2017, the challenge seemed almost insurmountable. Before the event, he didn’t even really know how to do front crawl. Since his accident, the furthest that Monger had run was 5km, before the discomfort around his prosthetics became too much and he had to stop and remove his leg sockets.
“I watched these compilation videos with these incredible athletes at the top of their game, and they’re passing out literally 100m from the finish and crawling over the line,” says Monger, when we meet at a hotel in central London. “That’s where it all started to feel quite real, what a monumental challenge I was taking on. But also that did excite me, that’s what I wanted it to be.”
The other minor detail that came up in Monger’s research was sharks. Tiger sharks, the most aggressive of the locals, are common visitors to Kona. Between 1980 and 2024, there have been 177 shark attacks around Hawaii. And a childhood viewing of Jaws had left Monger with a fear of “the deep, dark oceans”. In a new documentary, Billy Monger: the Race is On, which screened last week on BBC1 as part of Comic Relief’s 40th anniversary, he voiced the concern to his coach. “Everyone keeps saying to me about Hawaii and sharks,” Monger said. “I’m like, ‘Listen, if they go for me…’”
The line, delivered with a wry smirk, is typical of Monger, who has sandy-blond hair, neatly side-parted, and a geography-teacher beard. Since his crash, which happened at the age of 17, he has been a model of forbearance and good humour. Monger’s story, and his recovery, is one you may have at least some familiarity with. On that day in April 2017, when his F4 racing car slammed into the back of a stationary car at 120mph at Donington Park, his car had been chosen at random to carry an onboard camera. Footage of the crash – which was pure bad luck, not driver error – went round the internet as Monger lay in an induced coma for three days, waking up to be told that surgeons had amputated his right leg below the knee and his left leg just above it.
At first, Monger focused on returning to motor racing, and within 11 months he was back on the track driving a specially modified car in a British F3 championship race. This chapter was told in the 2019 BBC Three film, Driven: the Billy Monger Story, which was Bafta-nominated. But since then, he has diversified. In 2021, he completed his first challenge for Comic Relief, raising more than £3m after walking, kayaking and cycling 140 miles in four days across Britain. He has also popped up on Celebrity Race Across the World, where he traipsed across Europe with his sister Bonny, and on the 2024 Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special, where he danced the American smooth with professional Nadiya Bychkova. He’s a commentator, too, on Channel 4’s F1 and Paralympics coverage.
Monger has almost forgotten where his comfort zone is these days, but competing in the Ironman World Championships was, once again, definitely outside it. He made it harder for himself by stating that he wanted to break the world record for a double amputee to complete the course, which stood at 16 hours, 26 minutes. Still – spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the Comic Relief film – it didn’t come a huge surprise that Monger, after an intense, topsy-turvy year of training, completed the challenge. He also bagged himself a massive new record, finishing the Kona course in 14 hours 23 minutes 56 seconds, more than two hours faster than the previous world’s best.
Crossing the finish in Kona – and hearing the iconic line: “Billy Monger… You are an Ironman!” – was a profound moment for Monger. There was, for one thing, intense relief he had not let the charity down. But then, as he was swarmed by his parents and support team, the scale of his achievement started to sink in. “In motor racing, you’ve got your helmet on, so you can’t really hear when you cross the finish line,” says Monger. “It’s solo in that moment, until you get back into the pits and see everyone, and by that time you’ve settled down a little. The raw reaction with the Ironman was much more elevated, because you can see, feel, hear everything.”
Monger’s main adversary in the water in Hawaii, it turned out, was not sharks, but jellyfish, which stung him painfully across his shoulders. But as gruelling as these extreme challenges are, he wonders if he might be becoming addicted to them. “There’s no getting away from that,” he says. “And after my accident, it has actually been a strong recovery tool, I guess you could call it, that I’ve used to help me bounce back from that life-changing moment for me. Fundamentally, this is what it comes back to,” he continues, “I don’t want to admit defeat at any point and go, ‘I’ve lost my legs, so that’s the end of it for me.’ It’s always been about proving to myself I’m still a very capable individual.”
When asked to describe his childhood, Monger uses the word “busy”. It’s economical, and hard to argue with. His father, Bobby, a motorsport fanatic, bought him his first go-kart aged two. “You can’t drive a go-kart at two,” says Monger, in that comic-weary tone again. “You can’t drive it until you are six. So he was very keen for me to have a go.” It turned out that Monger was something of a natural. He was a quiet, reserved child whose favourite subject was art and his calm translated well to the cockpit. By 10, he was a British champion. At 13, he was travelling to races in Italy with just his team bosss, when his parents had to work.
Both Bobby and Amanda, Monger’s mother, are in the film industry: he’s an electrician; she’s a makeup artist whose work on the Harry Potter films led to her being nominated for an Oscar in 2012. “The perks of that being that if my mum had to do any weekend filming, or if we had a half-term, sometimes she’d take us to work and we’d go on the sets and meet some of the actors,” Monger recalls. “Mum would be doing Daniel Radcliffe’s makeup and I’d be messing around with toy cars or something next to him.”
Still, the hours were long and unpredictable, and Monger’s racing had to fit in alongside his sister’s interest in horse riding. “Mum has to get there before the actors, get them prepped for the day, and then when the filming is done, she has to get rid of all of the makeup and stuff before she can leave,” says Monger. “So it’s almost like she’s first in, last out.”
One thing that did come out of hanging around on film sets was Monger’s nickname: Billy Whizz. Amanda was working on Fast & Furious 6, doing the makeup for the American actor Sung Kang and talking about her son’s racing. Kang suggested he needed a calling card: “Something fast, something cool.” And Monger very much lived up to his new moniker. At 13, he joined Forza Racing in the top ranks of kart racing. His teammate was George Russell, who now drives for Mercedes in F1. “He’s a couple of years older than me and the most talented driver that I had been teammates with,” says Monger. “I remember seeing his dedication and he really pushed me to go to the next level.”
For Monger that meant F4, and that fateful afternoon at Donington Park. I ask him if he ever replays the events of that day and he shakes his head. When he was in hospital for five weeks, he watched the footage quite a few times. He wanted to figure out what had gone wrong, what he could have done differently. (To give an idea of Monger’s mentality, when he came out of the coma, his first message, scrawled on a scrap of paper, was: “Who won the race?”) But when he came to the conclusion that it was just a freak misfortune – because the other car was stationary and he was unsighted – Monger became determined to move on.
“It’s actually quite a long time ago,” he says. “Scarily long ago, coming up to eight years since my accident. But I remember thinking about the accident when I was getting towards the finish of the Ironman, like, ‘Would I have ever done this if that accident hadn’t happened to me?’ So it’s more when I’m full of pride of what I’m still able to do now that I think back to the accident. And how, if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here today doing that thing, and breaking that world record. So I try to look at it in that way, as a positive.”
Monger’s optimism can, at times, appear superhuman. He puts it down to his family and the doctors and nurses who attended him at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. “They were massive in terms of reframing my mind when I was at my most vulnerable: to think of what I still had rather than what I’d lost,” he says. “It seems like a very simple shift of a narrative, but my doctor said to me, ‘If you work hard with your rehab, you can still do this, this and this, you can still walk and be independent.’ That was all I wanted and needed to hear in that moment.
“It would have been easy for me to just be a kid, be a bit upset, not really take responsibility for what had happened, because it wasn’t my fault,” he goes on. “And, that’d be that. But it was more the opposite: ‘Actually, this is the time where you do need to grow up and take responsibility for your life.’”
Monger accepts he has had to mature fast: at a time when his friends were going to university – or becoming F1 superstars – he was re-learning how to walk and then drive again. Another landmark moment in the Monger legend came in May 2019 when he won the Pau Grand Prix in F3, his first single-seater race win. But, in some ways, Monger’s hardest moments since the crash have been attached to the praise he’s received. “A lot of people started calling me ‘inspirational’ and stuff like that. And I remember being an 18-year-old going, ‘I’m just a kid that loves racing and wants to be an F1 driver and who’s had an accident.’ I’d not changed, but the way people viewed me had.”
Has he found a way to deal with that now? “I just reframe it in my mind: I don’t have to be an inspiration for other people; I just need to be me and if people think that’s inspirational, that’s up to them,” he says. “I don’t need to try to impress other people just because they’ve labelled me with this thing.”
The inspiration tag might not be easy to shift. Last Christmas, Monger became the first double amputee to appear on Strictly. Even Craig Revel Horwood was impressed with his poise and storytelling (though not by his splayed fingers, darling). “I’m used to having a crash helmet on, no one can see my face,” says Monger, smiling. “I enjoyed the training and learning how to dance, but I’ve never really viewed myself as a performer and that’s a hard skill to nail down for someone who’s had no experience of that.”
Monger, though, seems drawn to ideas that scare him and push him to his limits. He is comfortable at his family home in Surrey, but wants to move out this year and live independently, probably closer to London. He has a new-ish girlfriend, Zara, a DJ. But what really energises him now is a new goal: competing for Team GB at the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles. The notion was floated after he completed the Ironman last October. Monger’s coaches, who also have experience training Paralympians, crunched his training numbers and worked out he could be a contender in the paratriathlon, which is a sprint distance consisting of a 750m swim, 20km cycling and 5km running.
“I’ve really enjoyed the process of knowing that all my effort with the Ironman training translated into my performance on race day: the more effort I put in, the better I was going to do,” he says. “It’s different to motor racing where there are more variables at play. So the idea of being a competitive sportsman in paratriathlon, potentially at the Paralympics in the future, definitely intrigues me. If I could do an Ironman, if I can break a world record, why can I not go after a gold medal at the next Paralympics?”
Billy Monger: the Race is On for Comic Relief can be watched on BBC iPlayer (bbc.co.uk)