Formula One’s Michael Schumacher leaves French hospital, out of coma

FORMULA One great Michael Schumacher is out of a coma and has left a hospital where he had been since a skiing accident in December.

Seven-times F1 drivers champion now Ferrari team advisor Michael Schumacher, at the Valencia Street Circuit in Valencia, after the qualifying session of the Formula One Grand Prix of Europe, 22/08/2009.

FORMULA One great Michael Schumacher is no longer in a coma and has left a French hospital where he had been receiving treatment since a skiing accident in December, his manager said today.

Schumacher left the hospital in Grenoble “to continue his long phase of rehabilitation,” manager Sabine Kehm said in a statement.

She did not say when he was released, where the seven-time F1 champion was taken or give any further details of his condition, and her office refused to elaborate on the statement.

A Swiss hospital told AFP that Schumacher had been transferred there.

“Mr. Schumacher was admitted by CHUV (the University Hospital of Lausanne) this morning,” hospital spokesman Darcy Christen said.

Kehm’s statement said Schumacher’s family “would like to explicitly thank all his treating doctors, nurses and therapists in Grenoble as well as the first aiders at the place of the accident, who did an excellent job in those first months.”

“For the future we ask for understanding that his further rehabilitation will take place away from the public eye,” it added.

The 45-year-old German driver was hospitalised with severe head injuries after his December 29 ski accident, which split his helmet as he crashed into rocks on the slope at the Meribel ski resort in the French Alps.

He had been skiing with his 14-year-old son Mick at the time of the accident.

At the time, doctors said that Schumacher would probably have died if he had not been wearing a ski helmet.

Doctors in Grenoble put him into a coma to rest his brain and decrease swelling, and they operated to remove blood clots, but some were too deeply embedded.

Little information has been released on Schumacher’s condition over recent months.

Today’s statement was the first substantial update since Kehm said in early April that Schumacher “shows moments of consciousness and awakening.”

The German earned universal acclaim for his uncommon and sometimes ruthless driving talent, which led to a record 91 race wins.

Schumacher retired in November 2012 holding every major statistical benchmark - the most world titles (7), wins (91), poles (68), fastest laps (77) and races won in a single season (13).

Schumacher, his wife Corinna and their two children live in Switzerland.

After years of racing in the high risk world of Formula One, his skiing accident suggests that retirement had not dulled his relish of dangerous pursuits.

Holder of a pilot’s licence, an accomplished motorbike rider, parachutist, skier and mountain climber, the young retiree had not lost his love of risk taking, turning his back on the career of television pundit embraced by many of his former rivals.

He already survived a motorbike accident in Spain in 2009 suffering head and neck injuries but that time he was released from hospital after just five hours.

As an F1 racer, Schumacher was known for his daring overtaking manoeuvres, his at-times almost reckless abandon in the pursuit of victory.

When he won his first world title in 1994 with Benetton, he did so in controversial fashion, crashing into his title rival Damon Hill in the final race in Adelaide, Australia after he had already scuppered his own hopes by going off the track when pushing hard despite leading comfortably.

He almost provoked a similar crash in the final race of the 1997 season when battling Jacques Villeneuve for the title, an incident for which he was retrospectively disqualified from the whole season.

His career was also punctuated by accusations of dangerous driving following incidents such as a near collision with former teammate Rubens Barrichello in 2010, which the Brazilian later described as “the most dangerous thing” he had been through.

He retired at the end of the 2006 season before making a damp squib of a comeback in 2010 with Mercedes.

Schumacher’s duels in his heyday with Hill, Villeneuve and Mika Hakkinen, fired by an unquenchable competitive spirit, have gone down in Formula One folklore.

Schumacher was born in January 1969 near Cologne, Germany, the son of a bricklayer who also ran the local go-kart track, where his mother worked in the canteen. His younger brother, Ralf also became a successful Formula One driver.

By 1987, Schumacher was the German and European go-kart champion and had left school to work as an apprentice mechanic, although he was soon racing professionally.

In 1990 he won the German F3 championship and was hired by Mercedes to drive sports cars. Just a year later he burst onto the Formula One scene, qualifying seventh for Jordan in his debut race at Belgium.

The young German was immediately snapped up by Benetton, where he won his first Formula One race in 1992, again at Belgium’s tough Spa-Francorchamps circuit.

Schumacher won 18 races over the next four seasons with Benetton, claiming back-to-back world titles in 1994 and 1995.

In 2002 Schumacher won 11 times and finished on the podium in all 17 races. In 2003, he broke Argentine Fangio’s record by claiming his sixth world title and in 2004 he won 13 races, his greatest season.

He was also given the title of “Rain King” because he was at his best in the most challenging conditions - winning 17 of 30 career races in the wet.

Married to Corinna since 1995 with two children Gina-Maria, 16, and 14-year-old Mick, Schumacher may have retired in 2012 after a glittering career but his love for speed and danger never left him.

The irony is that after a life spent negotiating potentially fatal turns his only serious injury was breaking his leg in 1999.

Schumacher told German television in 2009 about his accident at Silverstone on July 11, 1999, when he drove into a wall of tyres and broke his leg.

“I lie there and think about how I can start to feel my heartbeat again. And I feel how it gets less and less and then completely stops. Lights go out. And then I think this is how it must feel when you are on your way up.”

AP/AFP