• Rossi explained his enduro crash

• Comeback at Motorland Aragon is out

• Hope to be back in Motegi

Racers always have this advice: When in doubt, give it gas. But perhaps life has a sense of irony, because it seems that bad injuries happen when they’re riding slow, instead.

Many a times have we seen a crash where a rider was flung metres into the air and then down the track, only to get up and walk away unharmed, while his bike self-destructed by tumbling itself into pieces of carbon fibre and metal biscuits.

Yet, we’ve also witnessed innocuous-looking crashes when for example, the tyres slid out from underneath the rider but he had to be stretchered off into an ambulance.

Triple World Champion, “Mr. Perfect” Wayne Rainey’s tragic lowside at Misano in  turned him into a paraplegic, and the late Nicky Hayden was fatally hit by a car while cycling on public roads.

And it’s the same for Valentino Rossi, although thankfully not as bad as the other two gentlemen.

He wasn’t racing when he had his enduro crash, “Unfortunately, I was with all my friends on an enduro bike, making a tour around the centre hills behind Urbino in the countryside. It’s a thing that I’ve done since I was 18 together with my father for a long, long time. Very close to the end, in one downhill section at very low speed, I lost the steering, and to not crash I put my foot on the ground. But it was a bit downhill, and all the weight of the bike went on my leg and it broke.”

Speaking during the Misano round, Rossi knows his hopes of returning to the track in three weeks after his surgery is unrealistic and has to concede the Aragon round as well. Rossi had suffered a similar injury in 2010. A broken leg a Mugello caused his to miss three rounds – resulting in his first missed races of his entire career. Jorge Lorenzo won his first MotoGP title that year.

It’s from that experience which Rossi drew his conclusion from. “I learned from the other time that in this phase of the recovery, you have to live day by day. It depends very much on how the leg feels, how much pain there is. We’re already working and we’re trying to come back as soon as possible though. The next race after Misano is Aragon, but I think it would have been very hard to be back for there because it’s 22 days after the injury – just three weeks.”

Rossi also added that he’ll be back in Motegi.

We first reported about Rossi’s accident here, and Michael Van Der Mark replacing Rossi at Motorland Aragon here.