is dangerous, of that there is no doubt. But within the sport there is one category that sits (bruised) head and (fractured) shoulders above the others.
Supercross is a spectacular form of dirt-bike racing played out in stadiums, with wild jumps, eye-widening speeds and battling competition.
Few riders embody the sport and its elements more than Austin Forkner, the most successful rider in the 250SX class never to win a title. The Missouri native has come close, but painful on-track mishaps have always gotten in the way.
With its speed, acrobatics and general entertainment factor, Forkner tells CNN Sports that no sport has the blend of ingredients that Supercross offers: “It’s got the technicality of golf, we’re playing with inches out there.
“It’s got the brutalness or gnarliness of fighting, like UFC fighting … then it’s got the physicality of, like, a triathlete. You have to be in such good shape, you have to be ready to be injured and ready to go to war, basically.”
Talking to CNN at Triumph Racing America’s headquarters in picturesque countryside south of Atlanta, Georgia, the 26-year-old begins to list the injuries he has sustained in the saddle, gesturing to different parts of his body.
“I’ll just go through them. I’ve done this collarbone three times, this collarbone twice; I broke this wrist, I broke my hip, my hip socket, I guess. Let’s see – when I was young, I broke my ankle and the growth plate …”
It’s completely understandable that Forkner would have to think about it because this list goes on and on … and on. Far more broken bones and smashed body parts, in fact, than there is space here to list: “I’ve torn my ACL, or torn everything in my knee, basically, my right knee twice, my left knee once.
“I’ve torn my labrum in my shoulder twice, tore it, then retore it again. I actually had four surgeries on this shoulder within, like, 18 months, from two collarbones and two labrums. I compression-fractured my back a few years ago … and I rode with it because I didn’t know that it was compression-fractured.”
These are still just some of the injuries this extraordinary competitor has overcome in his career. It takes Forkner almost three minutes to relay all of them; he has even had part of his pancreas removed, along with his spleen.
‘Pretty scary’ brain surgery
But the most serious setback was not directly related to racing at all. In fact, were it not for the fact that the rider was being examined after a bad crash, it might never have been discovered.
“Last year, after the crash where I broke my back and my shoulder and I was knocked out for like five minutes, they were doing scans on my head and they found out that I had something called an AVM (arteriovenous malformation),” Forkner explains. “And I actually had to have brain surgery to have that taken out.”
AVM is a tangle of blood vessels that typically forms during fetal development and leads to irregular connections between arteries and veins in the brain. While many people born with AVMs live normal lives without even noticing, such malformations can be dangerous, even fatal if left untreated.
Forkner admits that it was a shock to find out brain surgery was needed.
“Even though I’ve done everything – I’ve done knees, shoulders, collarbones, wrists, ankles, everything like that, back,” he tells CNN, “it’s kind of two things you don’t really think about having surgery on: that’s your heart and your brain.”
The surgery itself, while relatively routine, was an intimidating prospect.
“They cut me from here to here, basically,” Forkner explains, gesturing across his hairline. “(They) had to essentially kind of pull the front part of my brain out of my skull a little bit so they could get down to what they were trying to do.”
The other troubling aspect of the surgery was the recovery, he says.
“I honestly didn’t really know what that meant for my career, just because, like all the other injuries, you’ll be back in, whatever, ACL, six months, any broken bone, six to eight weeks, you know, they kind of can give you a time frame,” Forkner continues.
“This was kind of, ‘We don’t know.’ So, it was pretty scary in that way, but not speaking anything about (my career), it was just scary. It was just scary to have my brain opened up, basically.”
After the event, though, perhaps unsurprisingly given the rider’s track record of recovering from injuries, Forkner’s path back into the saddle was relatively smooth and swift.
“If I could have (gone) to the gym two weeks after, I probably would have (gone) to the gym two weeks after,” he smiles. “I was basically limited because the doctor didn’t want me to get my heart rate up, get the blood really flowing through there. He was like, ‘We need to be chill, because part of it is that the AVM can cause seizures, strokes, and aneurysms.”