Taylor Mackenzie
My column is becoming more like 24 hours in A&E with Taylor Mackenzie than I’d originally anticipated. I’d love to talk about something other than motorbike crashes and hospitals but that’s the only thing that has filled my days of late. I promise this is the last month of it! To recap my previous column I was doing everything I could to treat my freshly broken metatarsals so I could return to action in Assen.
I managed it okay; in just over two weeks I got enough movement back in my left foot to let me pass BSB’s fit to ride test, which works like this: take your shoes off, stand on your broken foot and jump on one leg to prove its strong enough, twice, just to make sure. Lovely! Once I’d got that part out of the way the pain was pretty manageable when I was riding. The team had made a big leap forward with the electronics at Oulton Park while I was absent and riding a much more competitive bike provided me with a lot of adrenaline to help mask the bone crunching when I changed gear. I was trying to pace myself in practice to save my energy for the races so my foot didn’t give up on me.
Unfortunately I didn’t make it that far; a small high side which should of been nothing more than an annoying little crash to prematurely end a qualifying session, rapidly turned into one of the nastiest little crashes of my career. I was flipped over the top of the screen landing head first, at which point my visor came open. That allowed my handlebar a clean shot at my face, splitting my nose open.
Then 180kg of Superbike landed on me for the second time in three weeks which partly dislocated my shoulder, stretching the joint that far back that my shoulder broke in two places, prematurely ending not just my session, but my entire season. I laid in the medical centre with blood pouring down my face feeling like I’d done 12 rounds with Muhammad I’m Hard Bruce Lee.
Racing’s a funny sport because it changes so fast. Last year I won 14 races, won a British Championship, won the Mallory Park Race of the Year and finished 4th overall in the BMW International Race Trophy. This season I’ve only had three more crashes, yet I’ve DNF’d and DNS’d 16 races, been hospitalised four times, had one concussion and broken my body in four different places. ‘That’s racing’ as they say. The year previous to that in 2015 I had 28 mechanical problems during the year including bursting into a fireball, but I managed to come back to have my best ever season. Racing’s very often a case of 90% misery and 10% ecstasy. But that ten per cent is the part I live for though and the reason I’m still sat here thinking about how I’m going to come back even stronger next year.