Carles Falcón Brunet died from his accidents Monday, per week after crashing throughout Stage #2 of the Dakar Rally. He was 45 years outdated.
Falcón, racing within the Rally2 class and Authentic by Motul subclass as a Malle Moto solo rider, crashed 448 kilometres into the second stage. He had been working fiftieth total in Rally2 (fourteenth in Malle Moto) after ending seventy-second in school within the Prologue and forty-ninth the next day.
Fellow riders stopped to manage assist till medical assist arrived, and he was found to not have a pulse from cardiac arrest. He was subsequently resuscitated and airlifted to hospital in Dawadmi, the place he was positioned in a medically induced coma and identified with a fracture in his C2 vertebra (a hangman’s fracture) and edema in his head. After being transferred to a different hospital in Riyadh, he was flown house to Spain on Friday.
“Carles was a smiling particular person, all the time energetic, who passionately loved every thing he did, particularly bikes,” reads an announcement from his TwinTrail Racing Staff. “He left us doing one thing that was his dream, collaborating within the Dakar. He was having fun with it, he was glad on the bike. We should keep in mind him for his smile and the happiness he generated in everybody.”
TwinTrail, who additionally fielded a motorbike for his buddy Isaac Feliu, withdrew from the rally shortly after his accident. Feliu had undergone an analogous collection of occasions throughout their Dakar début in 2022, when he crashed and suffered a concussion and C7 fracture that left him in a coma for 2 weeks. After recovering, he and Falcón determined to pursue the 2024 Dakar. Had tragedy not struck, Falcón can be seeking to enhance upon his sixty-eighth total and sixteenth in Malle Moto from 2022.
A former laptop engineer, Falcón was the corporate supervisor at Feliu’s TwinTrail Expertise, a Spanish journey motorbike agency that Feliu based in 2015. As a part of his duties, he was an teacher and journey bike route information, and the duo additionally ran a day by day Dakar recap present on YouTube.
“I used to let you know fairly often that I like you. And now, although you’re not right here bodily, I’ll proceed to like you very a lot till the top of my days,” started a publish from Feliu. “You could have been an instance to observe, a brother. I’ll all the time carry you inside me, and as I instructed you within the final publish, you’ll accompany me in all adventures and proceed to show me issues. Hugs to the sky and one million thanks for the time we now have shared.”
Falcón is the forty-sixth particular person to die from incidents linked to the Dakar Rally since its inception in 1979, the thirty-third race-related personnel, and the primary competitor since Pierre Cherpin in 2021. A deadly accident has occurred yearly because the Dakar moved to Saudi Arabia in 2020, together with the deaths of motorbike racers Paulo Gonçalves and Edwin Straver that 12 months, Cherpin in 2021, Dakar Traditional mechanic Quentin Lavallée in 2022, and a spectator in 2023. The primary stage of the 2024 Dakar narrowly averted one other tragedy when one other fan was hit by Lionel Baud’s automotive at first, although he solely suffered a fractured tibia and fibula.
