Rea faces long recovery battle

From Castrol Honda SBK

Castrol Honda World Superbike rider Jonathan Rea looks set to miss more than just this weekend’s two seventh round World Superbike championship races at Aragon in Spain following surgery in the UK on Wednesday.

Rea crashed during warm-up for round six of the series last Sunday at Misano in Italy, with the most serious initial diagnosis - following x-rays at the Ospetale Bufalini in Cesena - being a fractured radius near his right wrist.

The 24-year-old from Northern Ireland flew back to Manchester on Monday to visit consultant orthopaedic hand surgeon, Mike Hayton, who operated on Rea Wednesday afternoon. In addition to the radius fracture, however, the surgery also revealed damage to the scapholunate ligament in his right wrist.

A screw was inserted in the radius bone and the ligament damage has been pinned. It means that Rea is unlikely to be fit to compete at the Brno round in the Czech Republic on July 8-10.

"I was pretty upset when I got the news after the surgery yesterday because it means a longer rehab than we’d thought," Rea said. "It’s difficult, of course, and I’m devastated, but I’ve got a great team around me so I know I’ll get all the support I need to come back strong. As I said before, I want to be 100 percent when I get back on the bike so, at the moment, I’m not going to put a definitive timescale on that. I’ll just concentrate on getting back to fitness as fast and as completely as I can."