MotoMatters.com is delighted to feature the work of iconic MotoGP writer Mat Oxley. Oxley is a former racer, TT winner and highly respected author of biographies of world champions Mick Doohan and Valentino Rossi, and currently writes for Motor Sport Magazine, where he is MotoGP correspondent. We are featuring sections from Oxley's blogs, which are posted in full on the Motor Sport Magazine website.
Collarbone injuries in MotoGP
They say that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. If you’re a motorcycle racer, you need to add collarbones to that list.
Bike racers break collarbones, simple as that. Wrists too, because when you jump off a motorcycle at speed it’s usually a hand or shoulder that take the brunt of the impact.
The clavicle – to give the bone its anatomical title – is the strut that joins the shoulder blade to the sternum, so it’s just asking for trouble whenever you land on a shoulder or an outstretched arm.
Which is exactly what Jorge Lorenzo did at Assen and Dani Pedrosa did at the Sachsenring – they both landed on their left shoulders and broke their left collarbones. Their heroics in deciding to race with their injuries were awe-inspiring. Made me feel a bit queasy, too. And now – through recent x-rays – we’ve learned that Pedrosa’s collarbone wasn’t just partially fractured in Germany, it was fully fractured. So he raced at Laguna with a fully fractured and unfixed collarbone.
Read the rest of Mat Oxley's blog on the Motor Sport Magazine website.
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Comments
High sides
A timely article. I wonder, with all the electronic rider aids which the manufacturers say make racing so much safer, why there have been so many highsides this season?