Matt Bishop: 'Something is wrong when we allow a 9-year-old to be killed in the name of sport'

Eight days ago, on Monday June 17, Lorenzo Somaschini, a young motorcycle racer from Rosario, Argentina, died at Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, São Paulo, Brazil, after an accident the previous Friday at Autódromo José Carlos Pace, Interlagos, having initially been treated at Hospital Geral da Pedreira. He had been practising for a round of the Honda Junior Cup. Those are the bare facts.

He was nine years old. Yes, nine. There are no words that can adequately describe the tragedy of the violent death of one so young, or the abject devastation inflicted on the grieving family – in Lorenzo’s case his father Alfredo, his mother Carolina, and his sister Juana. It goes without saying that I extend my deepest condolences to them, as I am certain that you, reading these words, do also.

When I heard the news, I posted a tweet on Twitter/X, as follows: Yes, I know that motorsport will always be dangerous. But, even so, surely something is fundamentally wrong when we allow a 9-year-old to be killed on a motorcycle in the name of sport. It simply cannot be allowed to happen again. #RIPLorenzoSomaschini

Most of the replies to my tweet expressed agreement, or sorrow, or both. But, Twitter/X being Twitter/X, some responses were stupid, some heartless, and some bizarre. A few berated me for not having come up with a solution, or for demanding that children be banned from playing competitive sport, which of course I had not demanded at all. A handful drew idiotic false equivalences, one telling me that if I accepted that Formula 1 grands prix be run in the rain then I had no business tweeting that tragedies such as that which befell Somaschini were unacceptable. Another wrote: “Hang on, [are] you suggesting it’s possible to avoid any/all death for people aged under 16 years old?” No, obviously not. One even replied by telling me that Californians who allow children to “rething [sic] their gender” are a “SATANIC CULT” (his caps, not mine). No, I do not intend to debate that last point, not least because it has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the subject of either my tweet or this column. My god, Twitter/X really can be a toxic cesspit sometimes.

So here, among a more sophisticated audience, you readers of Motor Sport, the world’s leading racing magazine (and now website) for the past 100 years, let us look at the subject less hysterically and more constructively. After all, lashing out at strangers (in this case me) in response to their (in this case my) respectful comments about the tragic death of a child, for the purpose of picking fights on Twitter/X, is, apart from anything else, disrespectful to the memory of that deceased child and disdainful of the feelings of his traumatised family.

We all accept the concept of age of consent. We all understand that young people develop the emotional maturity required to take part responsibly in certain acts well after they first become physically able to perform them. In the UK you must be 16 to have sex, to enter full-time work, and to join the armed forces; you must be 17 to drive a car and to ride a motorcycle on public roads; you must be 18 to marry, to buy cigarettes and alcohol, and to vote in elections. All countries adopt similar systems, even if the details differ. It is interesting to note that there is not one uniform age at which a young person is deemed legally able to take on either responsibility or risk. Why is it OK for 16-year-olds to have sex but not to drive cars on public roads? Why is it OK for 17-year-olds to ride motorcycles on public roads but not to vote in elections? I do not know, but those are the laws of the land.

Clearly, if adults are to play professional sports at the highest level, as we exult in watching them do, they must learn their skills as children. Equally, because physical education is an integral part of the UK Department for Education’s national curriculum, sports are played in the UK by significantly more children than adults per capita, as a result of which more than half of all sports-related admissions to the accident and emergency departments of UK hospitals are teenagers. In his more introspective moments, when I worked with him at McLaren from 2008 to 2016, Ron Dennis often spoke of the problem, and in 2019 he put his money where his mouth was, setting up Podium Analytics, a science-led and data-driven non-governmental organisation and charity whose mission is to reduce the incidence and impact of injury in youth sports. I applaud him for it, as I expect you do, too.

All sports by their very nature involve human interactions that may legitimately be described as accidents waiting to happen, and children can therefore be injured playing any of them. However, deaths in the kinds of sports that children routinely play are thankfully very rare. Motor sport is much safer than it used to be, but it is still more dangerous than football, rugby, cricket, tennis, basketball, netball, etc. The purpose of this column is to ask a question, not to come up with a solution. A solution would and must involve the gathering of evidence, the testimony of experts, the analysis of medical records, etc. It would be impertinent if I were to attempt to come up with a solution here and now, without all that. No, what I am doing is asking a question, and that question is this: do you think that the age of consent for competitive motorcycle racing should be higher than it is now?