Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

Racing injuries By Gordon Ritc~ie n the school of hard knocks, there are two types of srudent: the merely average and the truly gifted. MotorC)OCle racers, of all levels of acrual riding ability, fall firmly into the gifted class. In fact, they fall ra ther a lot, most!y on to and occasionally into some very firm objects - some of which even masquerad as safety ba rriers. Only the terminally srupid or irredeemably crazy realize that bike racers veritable fixtures and fittings in the house of pain - face an unavoidable risk of injury every time they throw a boot over a seat squab. All motorcycle riders do, racers or not, but when your liveWl00d depends on being faster than all the other guys in every comer of every lap, you will crash - hard and often. In fact, honesty denies us the luxury I of refuting that motorcycle racing is one of the last true gladiatorial anathema in our increasingly safety-first we tern society - a momentary lapse of reason in humanity's innate sense of self-pre ervation. According to eminent neurosurgeon and former top Grand Prix medical officer Dr. Peter Richards, the only other sportsmen who can expect the arne level of wear and tear on their bodies over a full playing career are NFL and rugby football players. But what sets motorcycle racing apart from any sport I can think of is the institutionalized perception of the kind of injurie riders can sustain and till expect to be able to race. Or maybe that should be, S\lstam and till be expected to race... As a long-term GP racing enthusiast, and also the man once re ponsible for deciding the fitness or otherwise of rac- ers to compete in GP after inj\lry, Richards know the scenario of riders trying to pull the w over his eyes only too well. His response to the q\lestion of which riders have presented themselves to him desperate to ride b\lt patently unable to do so is simple. "They all did." And what does this tell us about the mentality of even top-level GP racers? "They're all a bunch of nutters who never look to the future but only live for the present," Richards said. Now, that's what's called putting it in layman's terms. Dean Miller, who has worked on the fitness and recovery from injury of virtuaJIy all the top American Grand Prix racers ofthe '80s and '90s, get a little more scientific and analytical. "Riders often lead themselves into what I call 'self-reliant paranoia:" Miller said. "Top riders believe that the whole thing depends on them and them alone, and no one can do anything else for them. They also think that even though they may be riding hurt, they are the ones to control the final destiny of themselves. Their paranoia is that racing isn't a team port like soccer or baseball, where'there is always someone else to do their job if they can't. To a rider, the only replacement for himself is himself - injured or not." So ingrained in the communal psyche of bike racing is the expecta tion that a rider will still race, despite carrying a serio\ls inj\lry, that exceptions to this rille become noteworthy in themselves. Possibly the most famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) example has been Freddie Spencer. The bike racer formerly known as "Fast Freddie" wa widely ca tiga ted for i'nissing half the GPs in the 1984 season and losing his 500cc title to Eddie Lawson after breaking a bone in his foot during a nonchampionship race at Denington Park. One of his main detractors at the time was the man he beat the previous season, Kenny Roberts. The archetypal racing hard-man went so far as to state tha t, "If I had broken bones in my feet, 1 wouldn't be feelmg the pam, they would be so full of ovocam." And few argued that that would be a "normal" course of action. Spencer, on the other foot, had a different attitude. "1 still want to be playing basketball when I'm 40:' was hi entirely reasonable reply whenever his "bravery" was called into q\lestion. A glance at the accident history of some of the current and previous protagonists on the 500cc GP grid is enough to send a shudder down the cosseted spine of any self-respecting osteopa Wc surgeon. Take, for example, Mick Doohan, and the most obvious and publicized of his many injurie while competing in 500cc GPs. His paIDflli but not \lncommon double tibia and fibula fracture during a practice accident at Assen in 1992 was the precursor to complications that got to the point of near-amputation in the hospital. His transfer to Dr. Claudio Costa' private clinic in Italy for a leg-saving operation and, as Mick put it, "a year's worth of therapy (rolled) into nine weeks:' meant that he duly appeared in Brazil for the penilltimate GP. He was, however, a specter made of fie h, with a leg so withered that, to the layman's eye, leprosy couldn't have been ruled O\lt. Miraculously, Doohan was declared fit enough (just) to race and was gra tefu] for the opportunity to try to keep Wayne Ramey (himself grievously and frequently injured that year) from overturning his championship lead. (The year 1992 was actually an especially bad injury season for all the top riders, with Ouch. Jean-Michel Bayle crashes the Modenas during the 1997 Bri1ish SOOcc Grand Prix, breaking his right wrist in the process.

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