Saturday, June 01, 2002
Zanardi moving full speed ahead after accident
By JOHN MARCASE
The (Alexandria, La.) Town Talk
Alex Zanardi was preparing to drive home Tuesday in Monte Carlo when he noticed his BMW had a flat tire.
For a moment, he acknowledged in a teleconference, his Italian blood was about to boil. A year ago, it likely would have.
But Tuesday, he did something else.
“I tried this new exercise, change my own tire,” he said, “which I didn't know I could do it before, but now I do.
“Only took me 15 minutes to get the tire out of the back of the car and do everything.”
Big deal, you're thinking.
Not when you don't have any legs.
Zanardi was one of the great racing drivers after tearing through the CART series in the late 1990s with a pair of crowd-pleasing, doughnut tire-smoking series titles in three seasons before taking another shot at Formula One. After a dismal year with Williams, Zanardi sat out the 2000 racing season, spending the year with his wife, Daniela, and their infant son, Niccolo.
In 2001, Zanardi returned to CART, driving for his former car engineer Mo Nunn. On the Saturday after the terrorist attacks, Zanardi was leading CART's race in Germany when he made a late pit stop for fuel.
For the first time since he left CART after the 1998 season, Zanardi was driving like the Zanardi of old, throwing caution to the wind and darting in and out of cars en route to the front of the field.
Leaving the pits, his car spun onto the track. Patrick Carpentier barely missed him. Alex Tagliani didn't. Had Tagliani hit Zanardi a few inches to the right, both likely would have been killed. Instead, the force of Tagliani's impact severed both of Zanardi's legs.
Thanks to quick work by CART's full-time safety crew, led by Drs. Steve Olvey and Terry Trammell, Trammell stemmed the bleeding at the scene while Olvey ordered a helicopter to transport Zanardi straight to a Berlin hospital. By the time he arrived in Berlin, Zanardi had just one liter of blood left in his body.
Zanardi remembers little from that fateful Saturday. He recalls joking with teammate Tony Kanaan during driver introductions. But that's it, although he was amazed when he finally watched a replay of the crash from the closed-circuit feed provided by the track in which the camera remained focused on his car.
“At the beginning, I can see that I was opening my shield, my helmet and then trying to undo my belts,” he said. “So there was a time in which I must have been awake and I must have realized, you know, what had happened. I must have said, 'Man, it's going to be tough to fix this one.' But I don't remember anything of that.
“I don't know if it was because of all the blood I lost, or if it is just human nature that when it is too bad it tells you we're going to erase that information.”
Life since the accident for Zanardi has been much like his racing career — full speed ahead. He's walking already with prosthetic legs, even joking once about now being taller than his original 5-foot-10 frame.
“For me, this is sort of a new life, and every day that I do something new, it's a little win,” he said. “I am the only crowd. There's no crowd like when I won Long Beach, passing with two laps to go, and taking the lead with two laps to go at Cleveland, but still, it's an achievement for me. It's progress. I am moving forward.
“I am fighting and every time I achieve a result, I realize that I am fighting, that I am improving, and so it's a reason for me to smile.”
And best of all, he hasn't lost his sense of humor that made his news conferences fun.
“I do swim, and besides, the sea is big enough for nobody to notice a strange human being without legs going up and down the water,” he laughed. “It's pretty embarrassing to go into a swimming pool and take your legs off and jump into the water, especially for the kids. They tend to watch you like you were a strange kind of animal.”
For his many friends in racing, the fact that Zanardi hasn't lost his playfulness is the best sign yet he's been able to adjust to the latest chapter in his life.
“I just have a very good relationship with life in general, and therefore, I can still see a lot of positiveness in my life,” he said. “My motivation for the man I am, my motivation, it's to be alive.”
——-
John Marcase can be reached via e-mail at jmarcase@thetowntalk.com.
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Zanardi moving full speed ahead after accident
