I spoke with Harley-Davidson rider Tom Wilson this afternoon in a wide-ranging interview where the man who (most said) suffered career ending injuries at Loudon this past June predicted that he will ride again (he's shooting for the Dunlop tire test in December). He also made some statements "to set the record straight".

Q. Tom, how are you doing?

A. Pretty good. I'm glad you called. This is the first time I have spoken with a reporter since my crash. Nobody ever called, nobody ever bothered to call. I was surprised at that, people just went ahead and printed hearsay without even bothering to call or find out what happened. Why they didn't print what really happened and not what they think happened, or talk to me... was not too cool. I'm going to Vegas and I'm going to talk to some people about what they wrote about my crash.

Q. Well, I can tell you that trying to get information after your crash was difficult. I made some inquiries in the team and got my information there. This was pretty early on and things looked dire on your end and I really didn't want to bother you or your wife at that time. I have a pretty good working relationship with the Harley team and I felt the team were being honest with me. I don't know if you're saying that what was written in American Roadracing was inaccurate or ...

A. No, what you wrote was fine. It's some other people who wrote just totally inaccurate stuff.

Q. Okay, why don't we start by you telling me what your day was like at Loudon? This was Friday in morning practice.

A. We had made several changes to the bike in practice, I was in and out a couple of times. We made one last change and I circulated a couple of laps. I was going into the last corner and the brakes were fine. I went down the straight and went into turn one and started braking and the lever came back to the grip. I pumped it three more times and there was nothing. I knew there was no way I could stay on the bike through Nascar turns one and two. So I abandoned ship. When I was getting off the bike, I knew I was going to hit the wall. I remember thinking 'Wow, I am really going fast. This is going to hurt.' I was conscious the whole time.

I hit the wall feet first and I was lucky that I did that. I don't think I would have survived if I'd hit it any other way. After I hit, it knocked the wind out of me. A cornerworker was right there and after I got my wind back I asked him if an ambulance was on its way and he said yes. I told him to tell them to hurry. I knew I was not doing well. There were some fans there and they were looking at me and I didn't want them seeing my face so I turned my head. When I did that I couldn't feel my legs. I stopped feeling my legs. That scared me.

The ambulance came and they said that they were going to straighten my legs out, because my legs were all stacked up like an accordion. Bones were cut into muscles and it was just a mess. So they did that and immediately it felt better and I could feel my legs. Then they put me on a hard-board and that really hurt because of my broken tailbone and pelvis. It hurt like hell to lay on that thing. I'd just like to say now that all the medical people and cornerworkers that I dealt with did a great job.

The ambulance took me into Concord hospital and they saw immediately that my injuries were too extensive for them, so they medivac'd me to Dartmouth. They did an excellent job. I called my wife from Concord because they were flying me out and I felt that it was pretty serious. I never call her usually when I get hurt until I know the whole story. This time I called her right away. She flew in, or tried to, but she got held up in La Guardia on Friday night and she got in Saturday about noon. I had been in surgery for ten hours at that point. I was very drugged up at that point. They took me to a hospital near my house on the following Thursday.

(Wilson at this point recounts the flight from Dartmouth to Ohio where the jet he flew in was hit by wind shear. Wilson says it was like the plane collided with another aircraft. The story is back in old news if you want to read it, uploaded months ago).

Then we landed and I got in another ambulance and of course, the engine died in the ambulance. I was like 'shoot me now'.

We got to the hospital and instead of admitting me like they were going to do, I had to go back into the ER so they could check me over and x-ray me for damage done in the plane. It did screw me up a little bit. So then I was in the hospital near my house and my wife works there so she was helping a lot. I was in bed for two months. By the time that Cycle News printed that I had been moved to an urgent care facility, I had been home for a month. More than a month. I was at home, in a wheelchair for three weeks.

I got out of the wheelchair about, oh, two weeks ago. I went to see my doctor and he said any time you feel like using crutches, go ahead. I stared walking on crutches two hours after that. I hate crutches so I tossed them as soon as I could. Two hours after that I tossed the crutches. The pain when I did that was brutal. I went back to them a couple of hours a day after that because of the pain and swelling. But not longer after that I tossed the crutches for good, they've been collecting cobwebs for a while.

In about another week and a half, I'm going to start hard physical therapy. I had an external fixator on my right leg (note: Michael Doohan and Jason Pridmore-style) but that has been off for a month and they wee going to do a bone graft but now the leg looks so good they're not going to. I've got one more surgery and then I'm done. I plan to be back on the bike at Daytona. Miguel might beat me back. We talk on the phone and he's envious of me, I have no casts, I was put back together with pins and plates on both sides so no casts were needed. It's great: no itching.

Q. So you do plan on riding again. No one expected you to come back, your injuries were so severe.

A. I read that and it just fed the fire the whole time. It made me want to get better faster.

Q. Tom, could you tell me what your specific injuries were from the crash?

A. Well, my left femur was broken in three places, it has two pins in it. My right femur is pinned together as well. My right tibia and fibula are broken, shattered, and they are plated with six screws holding them together. My right tibia is split down the center to my ankle joint. My pelvis, left heel, a vertebra, my tailbone and coccyx were broken. My pelvis is split in the center. I also have an abrasion to my right lung from the sudden impact. They had to put a colostmy bag on me after my first surgery because part of (my lower colon) is split from the pelvis break. It split the skin in there and its been healing. They told me that I had the bag after surgery and I was like, 'oh man'. There's nerves in there (lower colon) that control all sort of things from controlling your urine, to bowel movements to erections. As far as I can tell, everything works. They're going to take the bag out pretty soon. It has not been a fun summer. Quite depressing. In a way I was real lucky: the vertebra break could have been an easy paralysis and if I had slid in there any other way I might not have survived. Nobody could have taken that impact head-on.

Q. I received from the team some data that said when you hit the wall, you were going 80mph.

A. Actually it was more like 100mph. (Harley-Davidson suspension engineer) Dale Rathwell was standing right there when it happened and he said I never slowed down from the time I jumped off the bike. It's like 150 feet per second, in two seconds you cover one football field. I hit hard. And that's the thing that gets me, is that nobody that's running this deal realizes how fast these bikes are now.

I was happy that the riders refused to ride at Rt.66 because with the way that these bikes are now, there's no room for error, and the field is so competitive, everybody is riding hard. Loudon is not the place to be as far as I'm concerned. I was really unhappy to see that both Loudon and Phoenix were on the '99 schedule. I had hoped that three guys getting hurt this year there would have opened their eyes. Mladin went there for the first time and said it was ridiculous. And he's right. Same thing with Phoenix, that last corner is not too cool at all. The place is a bad accident waiting to happen, and the guys that have crashed there have been lucky not to get hurt at all.

What's it going to take? I don't understand it.

Q. We received some cards at the office for you that we sent to Art Gompper at H-D. Did you get them?

A. Yes, I did, thanks. The fan support has just been incredible. I never knew that I knew so many people. Or that so many people followed Superbike racing. We got, literally, boxes of stuff. I never imagined that there would be such an outpouring of cards and letters from people. We would go out to the mailbox some days and the whole box would be stuffed with cards and letters and it would take 45 minutes to read them all. Some of the people would write you letters and things like that, not just a card. It was excellent. Very cool.

Note: I think that everybody knows that Tom Wilson owns a machine shop in Oregon, Ohio where he does CNC machine work for a variety of clients including H-D and some medical firms. He was working before he sat down for this interview, and he got up and WALKED back to work after it was finished. He sounded, quite incredibly, very enthusiastic about life and his future throughout our talk. Wilson will be attending both the roadrace and the dirt track this weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.