Jeffrey Herlings isn’t a stranger to injury but as he explains below, his broken collarbone a month ago might have been the weirdest way to get injured he has ever experienced!
The Bullet told us: “I think it was the smallest, softest crash I ever did in my life. It was just a 180 and I just tipped over, honestly it was so funny, I just tipped over on my left shoulder and I broke my right collarbone! That’s quite impressive, isn’t it?!
“So I stood up and I was like I just felt like some bone sticking out, trying to lift up my bike like, ‘oh it doesn’t look good,’ and then I did a x-ray and it was broken, but it was broken quite nice so I didn’t need surgery. It actually was very difficult to get a surgery because I had a plate on there and it just broke next to the plate so I would have had to remove the current plate, put a new one on and it was quite a complicated surgery so the doctor said you just wait six weeks and you’ll be good but yeah, instead of being six weeks I was already riding at four and a half.
On his weekend in Lommel, Herlings said the weakness in his shoulder hurt him and led to the crashes – but he still had the raw speed as he showed in the first lap of moto two – going four seconds faster than anyone else!
“I just rode on Thursday after four and a half weeks off and the doctor said don’t go ride, if you crash you’ll re-break it. But I actually crashed four times on it and didn’t re-break it! And some of them were quite big, but honestly the crashes were quite nice. Like how I performed them was like a 9!
“But I had no strength. Like you can see in practice, in all practice I was second yesterday and first today and then you can see the beginning of the motos. I had the speed, I just didn’t have the strength. My arms literally after three, four, five laps, I just had no power.
“If I wouldn’t have had this collarbone I would have been able to do that for 35 minutes. I used to do that. I could do this one half months ago in Latvia. I got the speed to do it, I got a strength to do it. My body wouldn’t allow me but yeah you know, I wish I was a fit. Hopefully by autumn I’m a bit in a better shape.“
Watch the full interview below:
