A man who claimed to be left with a crippling fear of heights after plunging into a garden pond was later seen grinning like a child as he rode Europe’s tallest waterslide.
Ben Bardsley, of Stockport, Greater Manchester, submitted a personal injury claim against Warrington Koi and Aquatics in 2015, after a digger knocked him into a pond being built in his garden.
The 38-year-old claimed he couldn’t lift weights as a result and was also left with a fear of heights. However, a video of him giddily rocketing down a 108ft (33m) slide in Spain has seen his case written off as ‘nonsense’.
You can check out of a video of Bardsley riding the waterslide below:
Bardsley exposed his ‘fundamentally dishonest’ claim when he posted a video of him jetting down the Verti-Go waterslide in Benidorm, Spain, to his Facebook. Before jumping in the slide, he says: ‘There’s no queue for obvious reasons.’
As his case was heard at Manchester County Court on January 23, recorder Richard Hartley QC said the idea of someone with a fear of heights riding the slide with such glee was ‘nonsense’ and found him to be guilty of ‘fundamental dishonesty in respect of his claim’.
However, it wasn’t just his sliding antics that dropped the gym owner in hot water. Bardsley alleged that the incident not only left him with a fear of heights, but also neck and back injuries, leaving him unable to lift weights.
Insurance firm Aviva, representing the pond supplier, was suspicious. Upon investigation, lawyers discovered a wide array of social media posts showing the bodybuilder to be lifting heavy weights – even on the day he went a medical examination that noted ‘ongoing symptoms prevent him from performing activities that involved lifting’.
Damian Rourke, partner with law firm Clyde & Co, said:
It’s important to understand that Aviva never sought to argue that the claimant was not injured at all. Instead, the issue was that the claimant had exaggerated both the physical and psychological effects of his injuries to the extent that the entire claim should be dismissed.
While the claimant damages were assessed at around £4,500, because he sought to claim approximately four to five times that amount, he lost everything.
Bardsley was ordered to pay more than £14,000 in legal costs.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.