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to the operating theater

in less than three hours,

avoiding vascular complications.

The day after,

me and Davide,

we went to the hospital to

check Valentino's condition.

We stayed there a couple of hours.

I was quite worried about him.

Valentino will not depart

bike racing second in anything.

Valentino Rossi does not leave

this paddock on a stretcher.

However many points he was behind

his teammate, of all people?

Doesn't happen.

Won't happen.

Even if he just comes back and

wins one race to prove a point,

that'll do it.

Why did Rossi crash?

It was an unforced error,

pressure maybe, probably.

He's not used

to being pushed.

And that's going to

get worse and worse.

It takes a normal person five

or six months if all goes well.

Yes, five months

is to play football.

The surgery was perfect,

Dr. Buzzi did a great job

and put a long pin

in the tibia.

The guy who was clever on the Sunday

morning at Mugello was Pedrosa,

because he woke up

and he went,

"I can win this.

I can step into the shoes

"of the man who has dominated so

many years here at Mugello. "

He will win

the Italian Grand Prix.

In the absence of

Valentino Rossi,

it's not Lorenzo, but it's Dani

Pedrosa who wins at Mugello.

What a ride.

Where did that come from?

Lorenzo might not have

woken up so quickly,

and he's now coming to the next

race here at Silverstone, going,

"Right, I've got to be on it

and I've got to be on it now. "

One week after the

crash, you don't think of nothing.

You don't think

of the race and the bike.

You just have pain,

you don't sleep,

and you say "F***!"

every time.

I'll return fast!

It's gonna be

Lorenzo who's going to win.

He comes through

Woodcote Corner.

Lorenzo wins

the British Grand Prix.

So, Jorge Lorenzo safely negotiates

the chicane here at Assen

and wins his fourth

Grand Prix of the season.

Jorge Lorenzo takes his third

victory in succession in MotoGP.

Dani Pedrosa takes second

and Casey Stoner falls to third.

I have a strange effect.

I don't have any emotion

to see the race on television.

It's like something

very far for me.

I don't expect this. I thought

when I saw the race, I'd say...

But I was very quiet.

Just thinking of the best way to

recover in a shorter time to be back.

He's using the hyperbaric

chamber, physiotherapy machines

to improve the healing

of the bone.

When you cannot ride the bike,

you are very quiet at home on the sofa.

But when you say,

"Maybe it's possible, "

you can't stay at home,

you have to try.

He was like a child,

when you give a present, a gift

to a child at Christmas time,

he's the same, his face

changed immediately.

Valentino, even after 104

wins, after nine titles,

he really can't wait

to ride a motorcycle.

Thirty-seven days after the crash,

Rossi tests a Yamaha

superbike at Brno,

the day after the World

Superbike races there.

A superbike is a highly

modified production machine,

a step down from

a MotoGP prototype,

but still a serious

He lapped with the same pace

as the previous day's winners.

But if you ask him, he'll say, "Did

you think I wasn't able to do it?"

I mean,

that's his answer.

And now it's a lot

better already than Misano.

Five days after, we worked a lot in

the gym and in the swimming pool

to improve power

and mobility.

I have pain, for sure.

I have some problem

after the six, seven laps.

So it will be difficult to do the

long race distances for sure.

When I saw him crash at

Mugello, I seriously thought,

"Well, that's

the end of him. "

Any man who has

achieved as much as he,

who is richer than

you could imagine

and is now under threat

from younger rivals,

lying there looking at his

shinbone sticking out of his leg.

Not a pretty sight.

I really thought that we'd

probably seen the last of him.

And then he made me

look like an absolute idiot

by coming back

within five weeks.

He's actually nuts about

racing, he's mad about racing.

There's no other

word to describe it.

The doctor,

they were all surprised,

his bone condition

after just 40 days

was like a normal person

in double the time.

The shoulder

was very painful.

Five or six hours in the

swimming pool and the gym.

A lot of people

helped me very much.

Every day

is a small victory.

It's his heart,

his passion,

his desire to escape

the monotony of everyday,

to return to the fatal

attraction

of the marvelous world

of motorcycle racing.

This is the kind of thing that

can turn on you as you get older.

It's really hard

to stop racing.

You look at the great names

from the recent past,

very few of them have retired

because they thought,

"I'm getting a bit old now,

and it's a bit silly

"and I've done everything

. There's nothing more to prove."

Very, very few. Agostini's

one very rare example.

Valentino managed to

reconcile me to motorcycles,

because Graziano had a

very big accident in 1982.

Little by little, Valentino

has revived in me

a great love

for motorcycles.

Now that Valentino has hurt

himself, I'm a little worried.

Rainey, Schwantz,

Doohan and so on,

they stopped

because they got hurt.

They were nuts about racing.

It's a fine kind of madness,

quite a potentially self-destructive

kind of madness, too.

Well, his dad was a famous

nutcase who was mad about racing

and got stopped

by getting hurt.

Let's hope it doesn't

run in the family.

I stopped for a big,

terrible crash.

I crashed in

Imola in 1982,

260 kilometers

perhou

Was not a good

experience.

Dr. Costa said

that I'd probably die,

and then this was not true, and

I have been very, very lucky.

He was dead.

Graziano Rossi

died in that corner.

Because that corner

was very dangerous,

I had stationed

a very good doctor there

and he reached him within

seconds and resuscitated him.

In this world, the rider smiles when he

confronts a fatal incident or drama.

That is the beautiful thing,

because life has meaning only

when it stares death in the face.

That throng of

journalists is all outside

the Fiat/Yamaha

garage. Number 46,

and amazingly, six weeks

later, he's even able to walk,

let alone ride

a 240 horsepower motorcycle.

Valentino wasting no time at all

to put three fastest splits in.

Valentino Rossi top of

the pile by 0-57 of a second-

Situation

completely normal.

I wondered about the psychology

here, whether Rossi can pressure him

somehow by coming

back this soon,

or whether Lorenzo is just going

to manage to just shut him out.

Remember in 2006,

when Valentino Rossi was

aboard the yellow Camel Yamaha

and he had disasters

with engines in Le Mans,

and he had an engine

blow up at Laguna,

but by the time we got to the

end of the year in Valencia,

he was leading the

championship by eight points

ahead of Nicky Hayden.

Lorenzo leads Rossi by 104

points, more than four race wins.

But this is a sport that sees sudden

and brutal reversals of fortune.

Who knows?

Maybe Lorenzo will run into the

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