IN HIS final years, Evel Knievel, the iconic motorcycle stuntman who died aged 69 on Friday, was breathless and in constant pain, weakened by 35 serious injuries. But he remained addicted to the roar of the crowds.

His family said that, after struggling for years with diabetes and hepatitis C, he succumbed to the lung disease pulmonary fibrosis.

In an interview in January, Knievel, breathing from an oxygen mask, said he had few regrets over his “troublesome” life, but wished he had “put on a better show” when he last appeared at Wembley in 1975. He jumped over 13 buses parked side by side across the stadium - single-deckers, rather than the double-decker Routemasters he originally proposed - but caught the roof of the last vehicle.

He crashed to the ground, and then limped to the microphone to announce a short-lived retirement.

“I should have come back and done it properly, with bigger buses, these red ones,” he mused.

By his own accounts, Knievel lived to the full, blowing a £20m fortune, bedding 2,000 women - including eight in one day - and soaking his chest with whisky and setting it on fire for a joke in a bar.

He was friends with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin, who said he was “the cool tough guy we all love playing on the screen, the genuine article”.

Born on the wrong side of the tracks in Butte, Montana, he turned to burglary in his teens and picked up the nickname “Evil” when in jail from a cellmate nicknamed “Awful”. He misspelt it to avoid bad luck.

In the 1960s he started teaching himself stunts and achieved fame in 1968 when he filmed a daring and almost successful leap over the fountains at Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas. Television stations replayed it every night until he came out of a coma 30 days later.

During the 1970s he became, in the words of his son Robbie, the most successful crash victim in America: he broke his back while almost clearing 13 Pepsi trucks and both arms jumping over a tankful of hungry sharks. He broke his pelvis at Wembley.

When he finally retired he remained a hellraiser - battering a critic with a baseball bat and propositioning an undercover policewoman.

He preferred to highlight his charity work and late-in-life religious conversion, but will still be remembered as the man without fear.

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