Surgery successful with ambitions to return before 2023 season ends.
Empire Kawasaki MX2 rider Jai Constantinou will likely miss the majority of the 2023 Penrite ProMX Championship following a broken femur sustained in a Victorian state title round at Wonthaggi this month.
The Victorian recently underwent successful surgery and has since labelled the crash that caused the injuries as a ‘weird’ one, now back home on the road to recovery.
“I snapped my femur, that was a displaced fracture, but I broke my pelvis too in the crash,” Constantinou told MotoOnline. “I’ve had the femur fixed, they put a rod in that, but luckily I didn’t have to have anything done to the pelvis and other than being pretty banged up, there’s no other injuries.
“We raced the All Powers class on the Saturday, which went well, then we raced the 250 class on Sunday. In the second moto I had a good start, then had a bit of weird incident, I cased a jump slightly then the RPM of the bike went real low and then last second I went to hop off the back of the bike and then the front-end picked up and I sort of looped out, it was really weird.”
The opening round of the 2023 Penrite ProMX Championship takes place next Sunday at Wonthaggi on 5 March. While Constantinou hasn’t specified an exact return date, he remains hopeful of a return before the season concludes at Coolum on 19-20 August.
“It’s still a bit early to tell when I’ll be back on the bike,” he added. “It hasn’t even been two weeks yet since the crash. I’d love to try make it back for the last two rounds, especially with the last round being at Coolum, it’s going to be the last national ever there apparently, so I definitely want to be back for that.
“But, I’m just taking it day by day at this point, so we’ll see how the recovery goes. I’m going to hit that the best I can and see how that goes, but definitely aiming to at least get the last two rounds in.”