I spent the day at Oran Park today, assisting with the commentary for the final round of the Honda MPE/Rjays/St George Series. It was a beautiful day, weather-wise, but a pretty harrowing day accident-wise.
I have seen so many race meetings where the whole thing went off without a hitch and others where the day seemed to be punctuated with a whole series of unfortunate acccidents. Today was one of the latter. After the first 4 races, every single race had had to be stopped and restarted at some stage because of a serious accident. And the 5th race saw the most serious of the day. A rider competing in the BEARS race got out of shape coming over the “flip-flop” on the back straight and went out onto the grass on the right hand side of the track, coming in heavy contact with the tyre wall on the outside of the corner.
The unfortunate rider was flung up in the air, flying over the top of the tyre wall and landing in the grass behind it. The distance that he travelled in relation to where the bike came to rest indicated immediately that the accident was going to be a bad one. Help was on the scene quickly, but the ambulance crew was unable to reach him due to where he had landed, in between the tyre wall and a barbed wire fence designed to prevent spectator access to the area.
So the vehicle was forced to retrace its steps and drive right around to the other side of the track in order to gain access. With silence settling upon the circuit, everyone was waiting for some sign of movement to indicate that the situation was better than we were all fearing it was. Nothing. Lots of movement, people rushing to help, but no sign of the rider. The paramedics on site evidently assessed that the rider needed more help than they were capable of rendering and so, in about a quarter of an hour, the ambulance from Campbelltown arrived on the scene and the crew moved in to try and help.
It was getting more and more worrying by the minute, and even more so when we found out that the ambulance people were unable to extract the rider safely from his location and so the fire rescue truck was called in. More silence, more worry, more time. Ultimately he was moved from the grass and placed into the ambulance for transport to hopsital.
Thankfully, this sorry situation had a less than bleak conclusion. The rider was unconscious when help had first arrived and, when he regained consciousness, he complained that he couldn’t feel his legs. Thus the reason for the extra time taken in extracting him. However, by the time he was in the ambulance, he was coherent and talking and seemed to have regained feeling in his legs. As to the extent of his other injuries, we weren’t told, but we are hopeful that he will make a full recovery.
That whole process took over an hour and a half, and severely affected the running of the meeting, as can be expected. As usual, we were unable to say anything over the PA, and were only told what they wanted us to know, but it was a very scary time, I can assure you.
As for the rest of the day, the racing was excellent and, on a personal note, it was very pleasing to see some friends from Canberra doing very well at the races, including one of them winning the series overall on pointscore over the 4 rounds. And it was also great to see another friend finishing inside the top 10 in all three of the 600cc races after just starting a race career earlier this year.
All in all, a good day at the races.
