Why the Schumachers are breaking their silence now
A new documentary on the racing star may finally end eight years of secrecy,
E‘We do everything we can... to simply make him feel our family, our bond’
ven as he careered at 150mph around notoriously dangerous racetracks, Corinna Schumacher remained confident that her husband, Michael, would avoid catastrophe. She had watched in 1994 at the San Marino grand prix, as Ayrton Senna (Schumacher’s Brazilian rival) collided with a concrete wall at 145mph, a crash which killed him instantly. But still, she didn’t think it would happen to them.
“We’d always made it through his races safely, which is why I was certain he had a few guardian angels that were keeping an eye out for him,” Corinna, 52, tells a new Netflix documentary, Schumacher, released next week. “I don’t know if it’s just a kind of protective wall that you put up yourself or if it’s because you’re in a way naive but it simply never occurred to me that anything could ever happen to Michael.”
And in a tragic sort of way, she was right. It wasn’t a racing collision that ended Schumacher’s bill of good luck, but a skiing accident in the Three Valleys region of France, an area he was said to know intimately. It was a surprisingly warm day in the French Alps on 29 December 2013, when the seven-time world Formula One champion fell while descending an unmarked slope on the Combe de Saulire with his 14-year-old son, Michael. He hit his head on a rock, incurring a traumatic brain injury despite the protection of a ski helmet - and spent six months in a medicallyinduced coma at Grenoble Hospital. After regaining consciousness, Schumacher, now 52, spent a few months at a rehabilitation clinic, before being transferred home to his closely-protected mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva.
And outside a tiny circle of friends, family, and doctors, not a soul has seen him since.
Keen to protect his dignity, the Schumacher family have operated what some Formula One commentators describe as a “code of silence”, releasing virtually no information about the health of the man who dominated the sport for more than a decade, and seeking to admonish those who threaten that privacy. Almost nothing about his condition is known for certain; from his memory, to his ability to move and speak. In 2016, the family launched legal proceedings against the German magazine Bunte after they quoted an anonymous friend who said that Schumacher could “walk a little”. That claim was flatly denied by Felix Damm, the Schumacher family lawyer, who told a German court: “He cannot walk”.
It’s why Corinna’s recent interview with Netflix, in which she says that her husband remains “here, but different”, has proved so newsworthy.
“We live together at home, we do therapy,” she tells the cameras. “We do everything we can to make Michael better and to make sure he’s comfortable, and to simply make him feel our family, our bond. And no matter what, I will do everything I can. We all will. We’re trying to carry on as a family, the way Michael liked it and still does. And we are getting on with our lives.”
It is, admittedly, a vague description of her husband’s condition, but nonetheless surprising from a woman, and keen horse-rider, who has to-date kept her counsel.
But still, some Formula One fans have been startled by the family’s decision to cooperate with the film at all – a chink in the ultra-protective shield of privacy they built for Schumacher in the terrible days after his accident. Back then, he was among the most pictured men in sport; but since 2013 his family has managed to prevent the circulation of any photograph in which he is featured.
In fact, the fullest post-crash account of Schumacher’s physical condition came not from a relative but from Catholic prelate Georg Ganswein, formerly a personal secretary to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who serves as a spiritual guide to the family.
“I sat in front of him, I touched him with both hands, and I looked at him,” Ganswein told Bunte in 2019. “His face ... is the typical face of Michael Schumacher, only… a little more puffy. He feels that around him there are people who love him, who care about him, and thank God, keep the curious public away. A sick person needs discretion and understanding.” Their seclusion has proved controversial. Wille Weber, the driver’s former manager, said in 2017: “I find it very unfortunate that Michael’s fans do not know about his health. Why are they not being told the truth?”.
So why, after eight years of neartotal silence, has the family decided to lift their curtain of privacy?
Lee Mckenzie, a sports presenter for BBC and Channel Four, and long-time family friend of the Schumachers, thinks the decision may be about the needs of Schumacher’s children: Gina, 24; and Mick, 22, who is now on the first rungs of his own career in Formula One. Both feature briefly in the film. They were just teenagers when their father was paralysed – an experience that can prove difficult for any child to process. Intense media attention might well have made that worse.
“The timing seems right,” says Mckenzie, who met Schumacher several times before his accident, visiting him at one point at his mansion in Switzerland. “The children are older: they can handle it, they have their own lives.”
The family’s eight-year media blackout should not come as a surprise, says James Allen, a former BBC Formula One correspondent, and author of Michael Schumacher: The Edge of Greatness, the closest thing to an official biography the racer ever permitted.
He thinks Schumacher spent much of his career in a “protective shell”. Unlike other Formula One stars, the bricklayer’s son came from a working-class family, in West Germany. His early success was reliant on favours from others. “He needed other people to pay for his racing. He always felt he owed others. His motivation was always to pay back. He wasn’t as confident as he appeared,” says Allen.
But that sense of gratitude did not extend to the press, with whom he had an “uneasy relationship,” as Allen writes in his book. After moving his sponsorship deal from Benetton to Ferrari in 1996, Schumacher “took the opportunity” to construct a shield,” refusing to “lift the curtain into his own life. He kept a public and private persona, which also coincided with having children. He moved from Monaco to Switzerland to have more privacy,” says Allen.
The racer’s many fans hope the Netflix film might signal a new era of transparency, one in which they learn more about his condition and might even, one day, see their hero speaking on camera. But we shouldn’t hold our breath, says Mckenzie, who thinks the Schumacher film is more likely an attempt to end enquiries once and for all: “I can’t imagine anything else that might come out again after it.”
Schumacher obsessives, in other words, might never again see their hero – and with that, they may need to make their peace.
Schumacher is available on Netflix next week