news-engine

For many years, whenever a rider crashed in the MotoGP World Championship, the face of medical care was that of Dr. Claudio Costa. The Clinica Mobile, his brainchild, was more than just a medical facility: it had become an integral part of the paddock, a refuge for riders, and a symbol of a medical approach that operated almost in symbiosis with those risking their lives on the track. Today, the world is profoundly different. MotoGP has facilities, protocols, and resources that didn’t exist in Costa’s day, and emergency management has become an extremely complex operation. But if there is one man who, despite having a very different style and approach, has carried on part of that legacy in the modern MotoGP World Championship, it is Ángel Charte, MotoGP’s medical director. Not the formal successor to the Clinica Mobile —in 2014, Costa named Michele Zasa as his successor—but rather the man entrusted today with the responsibility that for decades had defined the doctor from Imola: doing everything possible to give a rider one more chance when an incident becomes truly serious. Charte discussed this in a lengthy interview with Emilio Pérez de Rozas for El Periódico, summarizing the philosophy behind his work in a few words: “In the World Championship, our job is not to make diagnoses, but to save lives.” It’s probably the phrase that best helps us understand what happens in the minutes—sometimes seconds—following a serious crash. On the track, there is neither the time nor, above all, the need to immediately arrive at a definitive diagnosis. The priority is to stabilize the rider, ensure his vital functions, and get him to the designated hospital. The current system stems primarily from the traumatic events of 2011 and the death of Marco Simoncelli at Sepang. The following year, Charte joined the World Championship’s medical team and helped create a new model, with true intensive care capabilities available directly on the circuit. This organizational structure was designed so that, in the event of the most severe trauma, initial treatment does not have to wait until the patient arrives at the hospital. “The unit was created in the wake of Marco Simoncelli’s painful and tragic accident in Malaysia in 2011. The lesson we learned from that tragedy was that riders needed a chance at survival, and this meant creating an intensive care unit for immediate intervention right on the circuit.” This is where the comparison with Dr. Costa’s era becomes interesting. Costa had revolutionized motorcycle racing by bringing the doctor close to the rider at a time when such proximity was by no means a foregone conclusion. He had invented the Clinica Mobile in 1977 and built a philosophy around it in which the human relationship was almost as important as the strictly clinical one. Charte belongs to a different generation and, above all, to a different approach to medicine. At the center is no longer a single facility identified with its founder, but an organizational machine made up of medical vehicles, local teams, a medical center, helicopters, referral hospitals, and personnel specialized in the care of critically ill patients. The underlying principle, however, shows clear continuity: bringing medical care as close as possible to the scene of the accident. This is also why Charte’s work remains almost invisible on ordinary Sundays and suddenly takes center stage when a red flag is raised. The viewer sees a crash; the television broadcast pauses or cuts to a different shot, and for a few minutes, the outcome of the race loses all significance. That is the moment when a system designed specifically for what no one would ever want to see happen springs into action. Charte has explained on other occasions that over the course of a season, the World Championship records over a thousand accidents, but only a small fraction requires intervention for truly serious or potentially life-threatening injuries. However, it is precisely for those few cases that the entire system must be ready every weekend. “Of the more than a thousand incidents that normally occur over the course of a season, eight or nine are serious, severe, significant, and cause for concern. And, without a doubt, immediate intervention at the track allows us to work hard—and often under enormous pressure—but always with the understanding that those minutes are vital to the rider’s life.” And this is perhaps where the biggest difference between a hospital doctor and a circuit doctor emerges. In a hospital, the patient arrives at a facility built to care for them. In MotoGP, on the other hand, it is the doctors who must reach the patient, without knowing in advance what situation they will encounter and having to make decisions immediately. Over the years, Charte has also become the face the paddock associates with the most sensitive news. When a rider is transferred to a hospital, when the nature of an injury must be explained, or when conditions call for caution, he is often the one to step in front of the cameras. A role very different from the one Costa played for nearly forty years, but one born of the same necessity. Dr. Costa transformed the role of the team doctor into a presence inseparable from the MotoGP World Championship. Charte has carried that legacy into a MotoGP era where emergency response has become a matter of science, organization, and protocol. “We’re talking about seconds. If you have a brain hemorrhage—which can be a fairly common yet serious injury—and you don’t stop it in less than two minutes, you lose the patient; the patient slips through your fingers. I believe this unit is a spectacular and tremendously effective innovation. And it’s not just me saying that. This is the most dangerous sport of all—more so than car racing, more so than Formula 1 —and, therefore, we had to equip it with a human and technical team of this calibre, one that has always, always, gotten riders off the track alive, including the four I subsequently lost, already in the hospital.” Motorcycles have changed, tracks have changed, and above all, medicine has changed. What matters when a rider lies motionless on the asphalt hasn’t changed: life comes first. Everything else can wait. Also interesting was his response to the question about riders’ ability to recover from injuries faster than “normal” people, as if they were aliens. “That’s a fairy tale. That statement is false. A lie! It’s an urban legend. The human body is the same for everyone. It’s obvious that, at a certain age, we can’t do certain things. They start taking risks when they’re very young. It’s clear that they’ve been in many accidents; they’ve learned how to fall and how to survive, but, at most, they’re special—not aliens.”