Cal Crutchlow aiming for Assen return

British rider Cal Crutchlow is pulling out all the stops to be fit to ride in next weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix at Assen, including undergoing a course of extreme cold treatment called kriotherapy.

Crutchlow is facing a race to be fit for the Assen round having broken his left collarbone in five places during a high speed qualifying crash for his home race at Silverstone six days ago.

He had an operation to pin and plate his smashed collarbone at the Royal Derby Hospital on Tuesday afternoon and is now determined to start practice for his Monster Yamaha Tech 3 squad in Holland next Thursday.

As well as planning to spend time speeding up the shoulder recovery in a hyperbaric chamber, Crutchlow is also undergoing kriotherapy at a health resort in Leicestershire.

Crutchlow is spending three minutes in an ice chamber at temperatures as low as minus 135 degrees, with kriotherapy becoming an increasingly popular treatment for sports stars looking to speed up their recovery from injury.

International rugby players, footballers, have previously used the treatment and a famous recent user was champion jockey Tony McCoy.

Speaking exclusively to MCN, the 25-year-old said: “My aim is to go to Assen and ride. Whether I will be able to or not I don’t know at this stage. I don’t want to let my team down, but I’ll have a think about it over the weekend, see how I am physically early next week and make a decision.”

Crutchlow is coming to end of a nightmare week in which he missed his home race through injury and he then suffered excruciating pain immediately after his two-hour operation on Tuesday.

Crutchlow had to wait four days for surgery as he was initially diagnosed with a non-displaced fracture of his C2 vertebrae after the Silverstone spill. CAT scans at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford though showed no damage to his neck and he said: “One minute it was fine and the next it kills for no reason. It looks like I’ve got no neck at the moment. All the way from my ear to the edge of my shoulder is swollen and it looks like I’ve got no neck. I’ve had a lot of operations but none has been as painful as this one.

“I can’t even describe the pain. I think it was because I was just lying in hospital for so long with a neck brace on and I think that was rubbing on my collarbone. Before I had the operation the pain was a lot less, but I think that was because I was so drugged up I didn’t remember how bad it was. I was on gas and air for nine hours and then I was on morphine. So I couldn’t feel the pain.”