Today, Team HCC / Honda’s Ken Roczen joined Race Day Live at the 2018 Tampa SX with Daniel Blair and Jim Holley, and he talked about his crash in San Diego with Cooper Webb, the subsequent major hand and wrist injury he sustained in the crash and when he guesses he might be back on the bike. You can check out what Kenny had to say below.
We see you’re in a cast or somewhat of a cast. That a modified looking thing you have on? What is that thing?
Luckily I can get away with just a splint. I’m not allowed to have any wrist movement or my thumb joint, but I can move my fingers. I started therapy already. There’s not a whole lot I can do as of right now just because it is so fresh. I can do a little bit of soft tissue and get my fingers moving. If you don’t keep up with all the muscles around your shoulders—the lats and all that—this stuff goes so quick. I’ve already lost so much weight, just muscle. I’m going to start working out on Wednesday again. I just want to give it a little rest. Simple exercises me and my therapist do, it keeps my whole shoulder and my shoulder blade working. That stuff stops working so quick.
With the splint, this gives you the ability to do all the other things and then get into some soft tissue before you start therapy.
Luckily, not a big cast. That helps out a lot. I have to clean out the incisions. I have five incisions on the hand because I have so much damage in there. We have to keep that clean. Every couple of days of so, I have my girlfriend clean it up and keep it nice. We try to make the incisions as clean as possible to prevent infection. And also, to hopefully keep them from looking too freaky once I get also that stuff off
I know it’s a little early to talk about when you’re coming back. Do you have any time frame? Have you written off coming back for SX?
Trust me, I can guarantee you that I really want to be out there. We were starting on the up climb, and everything was going pretty well. This was just unfortunate. I have to force myself to let that go. I have to focus on outdoors now unfortunately. I mean, I’m looking forward to outdoors. It’s going to be eight weeks until the pins come out. I have a check up on Tuesday. We’ll see more of how everything is healing. We’ll get more of a rough time estimate of when I can get back on the bike. As of right now, from surgery on, it will be about eight-weeks. Then I can hopefully start with some easy riding. That gives me plenty of time to get ready for outdoors. I can do everything cardio-wise and strength-wise right now so my body will be fit. Then the riding part, I look at this as a walk in the park compared to what I had last year. I’m hoping everything will be good for outdoors. That’s our main focus. Obviously this [SX] is done, but…
That was probably one of the weirdest crashes I’ve ever seen. Can you walk us through it and tell us what happened?
So I went through the whoops. You can see right there I got stuffed a little bit by Cooper Webb, just racing instinct. I didn’t even touch him right there, but I opened the throttle a little bit too early and the rut hooked me so hard. It literally slammed my body and I whiskey throttled off the bike. My arm got stuck in the back. An arm or a hand doesn’t fit between the swing arm and the wheel. Because the wheel was spinning—and the knobby—it sucked it in there and then out of there. So I have all five carpals dislocated on the wrist, a second metacarpal that is shattered and a bunch of torn ligaments in there. All the way up the elbow did not feel very well, but luckily up top was just road rash and a lot of muscle. My elbow is still a little swollen. I went to the medical crew—obviously they have an x-ray in there—but it’s not very clear what the damage is. In the beginning, they said it was just the metacarpal and it won’t be that big of a deal, but I told them from the beginning, I’m like, “man, I’ve had injuries.” When you know how something is broken… I knew how bad it was. I’m like, “I don’t know there’s gotta be something else.” Sure enough, four days later, Dr. Viola—who was in Korea for the Winter Olympics for Team USA—he flew back and we did further evaluation—so a couple shattered metacarpals and torn ligaments, all five dislocated from the wrist. That is unfortunately why I have to keep this wrist so stable right now, because of the ligaments and all that. That’s going to take time, but we can work on getting range of motion back later on down the road. Again, crap happens, unfortunately. It was a very weird crash, I agree. I’m still bummed about it and still think about it even though I need to let it go. I want to be out there. I talk to people and I say, “hey, I went from 2009 through 2014 without missing one race.” It seems like everything comes at once.
