Crash Terminates Arnold's Joyride

Mon., Jan. 9, 2006 1:15 PM PST by

The Terminator's bike chops have gotten a bit rusty.

While his cyborg alter ego showed considerable motorcycle-driving prowess in Terminator 2: Judgment Day's epic chase scene, Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to make it down a residential street without getting into an accident.

The 59-year-old California governor was tooling around in his Harley-Davidson, his 12-year-old son Patrick riding shotgun in the sidecar, near their Brentwood home Sunday afternoon when Schwarzenegger bumped into a car that was backing out of a driveway.

"The governor was unable to avoid the vehicle in his path and collided with it at a low speed," press secretary Margita Thompson said in a statement. The motorcycle mishap occurred about 3:15 p.m.

Schwarzenegger and son were both wearing helmets and weren't seriously injured, but they were taken to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, where the Last Action Hero star got 15 stitches to patch a busted lip. The other driver, whose identity was not disclosed, was unscathed. Neither party was cited, said Officer Jason Lee of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Despite the accident, and an even more dangerous spill a few years ago, Schwarzenegger refuses to say hasta la vista to the Harley.

In December 2001, Schwarzenegger broke a half-dozen ribs and spent four days in the hospital after wiping out his bike not far from the scene of the latest incident.

"It was a Sunday afternoon and I was riding through Santa Monica on my Harley, when the car in front of me suddenly braked," Schwarzenegger recounted in the bodybuilding magazine Flex. "My front wheel hit the rear fender of the car and I ended up sliding along the road sideways.

"I was taken to the ER at St. John's Hospital, and they told me I had broken six ribs and that I couldn't work out for three months, until early March," Schwarzenegger continued. "In fact, I started training again in late February, which was only six or seven weeks before shooting [on Terminator 3] began."

Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger has vowed continue to ride the Hog and has defied doctors' orders to relax and recover, sticking to a scheduled appearance Monday morning at a North Hollywood health-care center.

Mercifully, Schwarzenegger refrained from uttering "I'll be back," but the governor was quip-equipped at his first public appearance since the accident.

"I have some stitches on my lips and it's because of my accident, my motorcycle accident I had," he said Monday at a scheduled photo-op at a Southern California health-care center.

"It's not normally what happens when you see someone in Hollywood with swollen lips...It's collagen shots. [But for me] there's no plastic surgery or anything. It's simply an accident with a motorcycle."

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