The Jerez medical center has been a busy place for the past hour, with riders coming and going for their medical assessments.
Cal Crutchlow, Marc Marquez, and Alex Rins all had to pass a fitness test before being given the all clear to test. All three have been declared fit, and will attempt to ride tomorrow, to assess their fitness on the bike.
Marc Marquez is heading back to Jerez and will attempt to ride at this weekend’s Grand Prix of Andalusia at Jerez.
Despite breaking his arm during last Sunday’s race at the circuit, and having surgery to plate the arm on Tuesday, Marquez is determined to attempt to ride.
It was a busy day at the Dexeus clinic in Barcelona, as both Marc Marquez and Cal Crutchlow went under the knife to fix injuries picked up at the opening round of the season at Jerez.
Marquez broke his right humerus in a fast crash at Turn 3 during the race, while Crutchlow fractured his left scaphoid in a crash during warm up. Surgery was successful for both riders, with no complications reported.
Marc Marquez has fractured his upper right arm in a highside during the Jerez race.
66 million years ago, an object somewhere between the size of Mt. Everest and the country of Luxembourg (or the island of Puerto Rico) slammed into what would become the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico at a speed of 20 kilometers per second, or 72,000 km/h.
The impact that an asteroid of that size moving at that speed made was unimaginably vast: scientists estimate that the energy released was around 100 million times that produced by Tsar Bomba, the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever built.
The devastation that impact caused, helped along by wide-scale volcanic eruptions and climate change, killed a large percentage of life on earth, wiping out virtually all land and amphibian species larger than 25kg in body weight.
It could happen again. Objects from outer space hit the earth with alarming regularity. 50,000 years ago, a nickel-iron meteorite 50 meters across struck Arizona, creating the aptly named Meteor Crater.
Five years ago, on July 5th, 2015, at the Motorland Aragon circuit, reigning Spanish Superbike champion Kenny Noyes was getting ready for that weekend’s round of the CEV Spanish Superbike championship.
The American, son of veteran US journalist Dennis Noyes, and former Moto2 rider, had work to do to cut his deficit in the standings to current leader Carmelo Morales.
Noyes would not get a chance to close the gap. During the Sunday morning warm up session, the Kawasaki rider crashed. It was a bad crash. Very bad. So bad, in fact, that Noyes was left in a coma, and taken to hospital with suspected severe brain trauma.
In hospital, his coma was assessed as being very bad. His score on the Glasgow Coma Scale was 3, the lowest possible score, and the most severe condition of unresponsiveness, which is only distinguished from death by basic functions of lung and heart.
After a long coma, and then a long period of what is called “minimal consciousness” which is basically a vegetative state, Noyes began moving up the scale.
Andrea Dovizioso was taken to hospital this weekend with what was suspected to be a broken left collarbone, after crashing during a regional motocross race in Faenza, Italy.
On Sunday evening, Dovizioso underwent surgery at the Policlinico di Modena, and he will be able to start physiotherapy immediately. This means Dovizioso should be ready for the first 2020 MotoGP race, which is July 19th at Jerez.
For the second winter in succession, Marc Márquez is recovering from shoulder surgery to fix a problem with dislocation.
It didn’t slow him down much in 2019, the Repsol Honda rider finishing the season opener at Qatar in second place, losing out to Andrea Dovizioso by just 0.023 seconds.
He went on to win the next race in Argentina by nearly ten seconds, and crashed out of the lead in Austin. It was to be the only time Márquez finished outside of the top two.
So when Márquez decided to have surgery on his right shoulder last November (in 2018, it was his left shoulder which was operated on), he was confident of a quick recovery.
Jorge Lorenzo’s recovery is proceeding slower than hoped for, and will be forced to miss the next two MotoGP rounds.
The Repsol Honda rider fractured two vertebrae in a crash at Assen, an injury that came on top of the battering his back took in a crash at the end of the Barcelona test two weeks before that.
Just days before the Repsol Honda team launch in Madrid on Wednesday, Jorge Lorenzo has suffered a wrist injury. The Spaniard fractured his left scaphoid in a training accident while riding dirt track.
Lorenzo underwent examinations in Italy and Spain, and is due to undergo surgery in Barcelona on Monday, with Dr. Mir set to operate.
The accident occurred in Italy on Saturday afternoon, and became public when Lorenzo turned up at the Clinica Pederzoli in Peschiera del Garda, in the southeast corner of Lake Garda in Italy.
Dani Pedrosa’s career as test rider for KTM has gotten off to an unlucky start. The Spaniard has suffered another broken collarbone, and will require surgery and a long recovery process before he can start testing again.
Pedrosa’s injury is a legacy of the many previous times he has broken his collarbone. The right collarbone is severely weakened after being broken twice before, and having surgery to fit plates.
That has left him with a so-called sclerotic lesion on the collarbone, which means that bone growth in the collarbone is very slow. That, and a lack of blood flow to the bone, has left him with osteoporosis, and a weakened collarbone.