Three days after one of the scariest crashes of his career in the second race of the Supercross 250 East schedule, Austin Forkner took to social media to provide an update on his injuries and future.
His complete message can be found on his Instagram page. Fair warning: There are difficult moments to watch as Forkner processes his emotions.
Midway through the race with a two-second gap on the field, Forkner lost his left contact. Citing a warm, dry day, Forkner said he was not certain if his diminished depth perception caused the accident, but it certainly didn’t help.
“Most places it was okay,” Forkner said. “I was making it work for like five minutes of the race there.”
Until he landed short on a jump in a rhythm section. Weakened from previous accidents, his hand was wrenched from his handlebars and he experienced a brutal landing on a concrete path.
“I broke my L3, L4 transfers, processors or tabs ... that come off of the spine,” Forkner detailed the injuries. “I broke those on L3 and L4 on my right side. I broke my scapular, my shoulder blade, all the way across the top into my shoulder socket. ... bleeding in my lungs.”
Those are the injuries that can be documented.
“Those are the injuries I know of as of right now,” Forkner continued. “I’m going to get more MRIs. I need an MRI the shoulder, just to make sure I didn’t tear any ligaments in the shoulder. We didn’t do any MRI stuff. We just did cat scans and x-rays at the hospital, so I need an MRI of the shoulder for sure.”
As extreme as the injuries were, Forkner walked out of the hospital that night, hand-in-hand with his wife.
What Might Have Been
After viewing the accident Forkner, like everyone who has seen the crash, realized just how bad it could have been.
“I watched the crash like the next day or a couple of days after,” Forkner said, tears welling up again as he relived the scene. “I just broke down and cried because people (were) texting me, like, are you okay? Are you alive? I didn’t understand until I watched the crash. That was probably one of the scariest crashes I’ve ever had.”
Forkner has lived through this several times in the past four years.
In May 2022 he detailed another major accident in which he broke his collarbone, telling NBC Sports at the time that “injury isn’t the hardest part of an accident.”
Two years later, it hasn’t gotten any easier.
Forkner is not certain when he will, or even if he should, get back on the bike.
“I don’t know what this means right now, for me or my future, you know, riding and stuff related,” Forkner said. “I shouldn’t even be thinking about this stuff right now but that’s just how I work. I’m always about what’s next. But this one really did scare me.
“I always talk to God and ask for signs for Him to the show me this and show me that. And maybe this is just another milestone or another thing for me to overcome. It’s just going to add to my story. But at some point, you got to start thinking that maybe He’s trying to show me something. I want to be grateful and appreciative of only having these injuries.
“And if I just the second I’m released, I jump straight back onto a bike and straight back onto a Supercross track and go straight back to it, it’s like, did I get His message? Did I get what He was trying to show me? I don’t know.”
What Forkner does know is that the body must heal first before the mind can follow. When the physical pain goes away, the mind starts to forget about the bad times.
Timeline of Injuries
September 2023: Knee injury ahead of Chicagoland
January 2023: Full-thickness ACL tear and broken hand
2022: Re-injures collarbone in Arlington
2021: Broken collarbone in Houston
2019: Knee injury in East Rutherford
