10 years ago today, on December 29, 2013, the Formula 1 driver was the victim of a serious skiing accident. He has never appeared in public since, without much more being known about his state of health.
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One of the best kept secrets of recent years concerns the state of health of Michael Schumacher. The seven-time Formula 1 world champion suffered a serious skiing accident on December 29, 2013, just 10 years ago, when his head hit a rock. He was then on vacation in the resort of Méribel in the French Alps. Since then, the German pilot, victim of serious head trauma, has never appeared in public again.
At the time, the Grenoble University Hospital declared that he was suffering from a “serious head trauma which immediately required neurosurgical intervention”. After four weeks of artificial coma, two surgical operations, several months in the intensive care unit and a stay at the Vaud University Hospital in Lausanne (Switzerland), the man nicknamed the “Red Baron” returned home in September 2014. Champion the most successful in the history of F1, with seven crowns, tied with Lewis Hamilton, who succeeded him at Mercedes, Michael Schumacher, now aged 54, was installed in a medical bed in the family villa in Switzerland, in Gland. However, we don’t know much more about his state of health and the brain damage left by the accident.
In 2019, however, we learned that the German Formula 1 world champion had been taken care of at the Georges-Pompidou European hospital in Paris, to follow “treatment in the greatest secrecy“. A security guard then guarded the door to the surgical and trauma intensive care unit where he is hospitalized. At the end of 2021, a documentary was broadcast on Netflix. And the answers were still as vague: “What’s private is private, as he always said”declared his wife, Corinna Schumacher, specifying that “Michael has always protected us and now we protect Michael.”
A locked communication
The latest news from Michael Schumacher comes from his brother and it is, as always, cryptic. “Fortunately, medical and scientific advances offer many opportunities, even if nothing is the same as before.”confided Ralf Schumacher, a few days ago, to the German daily Bild.
Jean Todt, the former president of the international motorsport federation and one of the few to be able to visit the German in his ultra-protected residence, made the same remarks on December 13 to the newspaper The Teamevoking “a different Michael”, but with which “he had the privilege of being able to share moments”.
This communication from the Schumacher clan has not changed for ten years. A silence that some media are trying to fill. On Thursday, Bild explained, without further details, that the former driver, now 54 years old, was made to listen to car noises to stimulate his brain with familiar sounds. In April, a German magazine, Actualhad caused an uproar by announcing that he had landed an interview with Michael Schumacher: it was a fake interview carried out with artificial intelligence.