Joan Mir became MotoGP World Champion in 2020, but the previous year brought him a challenging moment. During his rookie season, he suffered a violent crash at the Czech GP.
Due to a mechanical failure, the Spaniard lost control heading into Turn 1 at Brno at around 300km/h, crashing hard into the barriers. He was attended to and later diagnosed with a pulmonary contusion.
At the time, Mir spent several days hospitalized, including in the intensive care unit, and his recovery took time – about two months later, his lungs were still affected and had blood. He recently reflected on the experience in an interview with Crash.net:
– I was in the ICU. I remember that after one week, I started to stand up. It took that long. The thing is we didn’t make a lot of media, the cameras were not filming what really happened. We didn’t make a documentary! But that doesn’t mean it was not hard!
Regaining confidence was difficult, even though the #36 returned to action with his best result of that year: ‘It was very hard. I lost all my strength because when you are one-two weeks in [hospital], you stop doing everything, you lose weight. It was also very hard to get back on the bike, because my crash was a mechanical problem. So then you have to trust the bike again. It was a very difficult challenge’.