got off to an awful start<\/a>, with TT debutant Dan Ingham dying in Wednesday night\u2019s practice session and multiple other racers and, even worse, spectators injured and hospitalised.<\/p>\nOne of those hurt and currently described as serious but stable is Maria Costello, one of the few women racing against the TT and an old friend of mine who I\u2019ve known for years. I was at Buckingham Palace with her the day she was awarded an MBE for services to motorsports.<\/p>\n
I try very hard every time a friend is hurt or dies at the TT not to make light of their deaths in any way when I use any of the old cliches that always get rolled out at times like this: that they died doing what they loved, that they\u2019d do it all over again, that they knew the risk. But the truth in all of those perhaps-overused statements is that it is very much the reality.<\/p>\n
No one goes to the TT not intending to come back, but everyone who races on the 37.73-mile course knows what can go wrong, sometimes even without any fault of their own. David Jefferies, a nine-time winner in 2003 when he lost his life, crashed on someone else\u2019s oil spill. Gene McDonnell was hit by a horse startled by an air ambulance. Nick Crowe lost an arm when a hare ran in front of his sidecar.<\/p>\n
But danger happens in all walks of life and in plenty of other sports too, and it sometimes feels like the TT\u2019s problem when faced with opposition from people who\u2019ve never experienced it is an issue more of branding than of genuine concern.<\/p>\n
Reckless hooligan bikers taking over a small island and going wild and reckless for days? An uproar. But when the same number of people die every year on Everest (which averages five deaths a year)? Well, they\u2019re mountain men, adventurers; brave, heroic, fearless.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not particularly a libertarian; I don\u2019t for a minute believe that we should be scrapping safety rules and tearing up \u2018red tape\u2019 in an attempt at deregulation.<\/p>\n
But the TT isn\u2019t unregulated, no one is forced to be there, and it\u2019s always trying to be as safe as it can be \u2013 something I wish I could say for some of the other series I cover.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m pretty well-known for being vocal about always pushing for improved safety measures at MotoGP, and that normally leaves one question I get asked a lot around TT: how on earth do you reconcile asking for better safety at one series while continuing to support another that\u2019s orders of magnitude more dangerous?<\/p>\n
Yet the TT is, in my opinion, far more proactive than MotoGP in many ways. Proactive rather than reactive responses? Check. Better concussion protocol? Check. Mental health care for riders and support staff? Check. An ability to actually learn from what has happened rather than continuing to make the same mistakes? Also check.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong; there are still some things that need to be worked on.<\/p>\n
Communication is one \u2013 it still feels like deaths are something that the organisers would rather sweep under the mat sometimes, with notices coming late in the day and often conveniently only after the remainder of the racing has been completed.<\/p>\n
And of course, there\u2019s one major problem with trying to make the TT safer, as I\u2019ve already touched upon: the course can simply never be fully safe, for all the reasons mentioned and more.<\/p>\n
But as long as there are people willing to race on it \u2013 and I have a feeling that there will be for as long as there are motorbikes to race \u2013 then there\u2019ll be others drawn in by the drug that is the TT.<\/p>\n
I sort of wish that I\u2019d never become addicted to it, but I fear that it\u2019s far too late for rehabilitation now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four years ago, our MotoGP correspondent Simon Patterson wrote a column about how he balances his love of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-700711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}