With the MotoGP season now officially ended, riders are taking the opportunity to have various medical niggles sorted out ready for 2014. Last week, Dani Pedrosa had the metal plate removed from his right collarbone; and on Sunday, Nicky Hayden had a screw removed from his right wrist.
Pedrosa’s surgery brings to a close a painful chapter in his life. The plate which has just been removed was inserted on his right collarbone after his clash with Marco Simoncelli at Le Mans in 2011.
Pedrosa was reluctant to have surgery on his his right collarbone, as he was only just starting to recover from surgery on his left collarbone, which he had injured at Motegi in 2010.
The operation to fix that injury had seen screws compress the artery leading down to his left arm, causing a loss of feeling during racing. The clash with Simoncelli took place just weeks after an operation to resolve the thoracic outlet syndrome which had resulted from the previous injury.
With the plate in his right collarbone removed, Pedrosa will need two weeks of rest before starting physical rehabilitation. The recovery period should give his collarbone time to heal, and for bone growth to fill in the holes left by the screws, restoring his collarbone to full strength.
Over in the US, Nicky Hayden has had surgery to remove a screw holding together the scaphoid he injured in a crash at Valencia in 2011. Since that crash, Hayden had suffered irritation in his right wrist, his hand often swelling up quite badly. Hayden exacerbated the injury in 2012, when he crashed during qualifying at Indianapolis.
With the swelling getting worse this year, Hayden decided to have the screw removed by Dr. Ting in California after this season. Surgery went well, and Hayden posted up pictures both before and after on his Instagram and Twitter pages.
Photo: Jensen Beeler / Asphalt & Rubber – Creative Commons – Attribution 3.0
This article was originally published on MotoMatters, and is republished here on Asphalt & Rubber with permission by the author.
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