How close was Roczen to losing his arm?

By now, almost everyone has seen the footage of HRC factory Honda’s Ken Roczen going over the bars at Rd 3 of the AMA Supercross at Anaheim 2. But few of us knew how close he came to losing his arm … at least, until Ken recently shared this heavy story about his season-ending injury on his Instagram page.

“You spend months preparing, training and lots of riding for racing and never even tip over really. Literally go without crashing for weeks and everything washes down the drain from just one little bitty mishap. To be honest, I dont see anything I did wrong. Not like the previous years where I go “man that was stupid” – But riding/racing you have to act quick… very quick! And in the end you can’t pause the world and think about what you are going to do for a second. You will always go with your instinct and there is nothing wrong with that it’s part of learning and getting better. But like I said, I would love to look at the crash and say, ohhh that’s what happened.. but I can’t. Not sure if that makes it easier or harder, anyway I felt more gathered, collected and focused than ever before as you could tell in my riding but then something this scary happens so quick. I got very lucky that I really just demolished my arm because at that speed and height it could have been very ugly. It was still scary coming out of the first surgery as Doc Viola said if it wouldn’t have been done now I could have lost my arm. I started experiencing compartment syndrome, which means my muscles were so swollen from the impact that they stopped getting blood flow and slowly stop working and once the muscle is dead there is no bringing it back. Tough pill to swallow, but hey, it could have been worse. I felt like sharing the story, it’s good to hear that things are gonna be fine, I just gotta be patient” – Ken Roczen.

If you have been living under a rock and missed the crash, here it is: