Valentino Rossi’s reputation as one of the coolest hard men in sport suffered a blow when the six-time world motorcycling champion was taken to hospital after a curtain-related incident. The Italian legend’s fall from grace resulted in him having stitches to wounds in his foot and hand as he rued an ill-fated attempt to fix the drapes at his home.
Rossi fell is believed to have been closing the curtains when he tripped and fell onto a glass table. That broke and he suffered cuts to his left hand and the sole of his left foot. While the injuries are not serious, they are badly timed as Rossi is due to ride his Yamaha at the first MotoGP test of the season in Sepang, Malaysia tomorrow. “It is not yet clear whether or not they will make him uncomfortable when riding this week,” a Yamaha spokeswoman said.
It was an unusually clumsy mishap for a man who is a megastar in Italy and a regular on the Forbes rich list. It is also embarrassingly mundane given that his team-mate, Jorge Lorenzo, rode with two broken ankles last season after a dramatic crash.
The 29-year-old now joins a long list of calamitous sports stars who have found the domestic scene to be fraught with dangers. One of the least fortunate was Darren Barnard, the former Barnsley footballer, who suffered knee ligament damage after slipping in puppy urine on his kitchen floor. Dave Beasant, the burly Southampton goalkeeper, was sidelined for two months when he dropped a bottle of salad cream on his foot, while Arsenal legend Charlie George lost a finger cutting the lawn. It is even possible to injure yourself while doing nothing as Rio Ferdinand found shortly after becoming the world’s most expensive defender. He strained a leg sitting with his feet up on a coffee table.
The sporting arena is no safe haven, of course. Gritty defender Svein Grondalen can testify to that after colliding with a moose while on a training run, forcing his withdrawal the Norway squad. Arguably the most bizarre sporting injury of all came back in the 1920s when Clarence Blethen, a baseball player with the Boston Red Sox, forgot that he had put his dentures in his back pocket and soon found out he had a grim future behind him. Reality has bitten for Rossi, too, who must now hope that tomorrow’s curtain-raiser is better than his last.