Copyright 2003, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.

KTM factory Supermoto racer Doug Chandler broke his left fibula and tore ligaments in his left ankle in a crash during the AMA KTM Supermoto Unlimited race October 5 in Columbus, Ohio.

“Yeah, broken leg and I got some stuff I tore and messed up in my ankle. So I’m going to get that fixed at 7:45 this evening,” Chandler told Roadracingworld.com in a telephone interview Tuesday morning. The three-time AMA Superbike Champion plans to have surgery at the hands of orthopedic surgeon Dr. Arthur Ting in Fremont, California, not far from Chandler’s Salinas, California home.

The crash happened as pole-sitter Chandler was racing his HMC KTM teammate Ben Carlson into the first turn in the Unlimited Supermoto main event in Ohio. “Not quite to the first turn,” pointed out Chandler. “I think me and Benny somehow, I don’t know who got on top of who, the hand guards just locked and pulled us both down. He went down. Then it pulled me down. My foot, I think, got run over by his bike and then thrown under mine as I was going down. I twisted it and gave it a good wrenching.

“Mainly I tore the ligaments. It let it [fibula] kind of come out of socket. So we’ve got to put a screw in there to center it back in the socket while the tendons heal themselves and get strong again. It’s all ankle. I broke the little bone [fibula] up high below the knee, but there’s not a whole lot they can do on that stuff…Looking at the pictures, looking at how tweaked my foot was and all things considered, it wasn’t so bad.”

Chandler, 38, was third in the Red Bull Supermoto class point standings and fifth in the KTM Unlimited Supermoto class rankings heading into the Columbus event. Asked when he might return to the AMA Supermoto series, Chandler said, “We’re trying to shoot for the final at Vegas, that third week [in November]. It’ll be kind of marginal because Art’s [Dr. Ting] saying he doesn’t want me to put any weight on it or nothing for three to four weeks. We’ll see.”

Chandler has crashed relatively infrequently during his long professional racing career, which left him free from injury. Asked when was the last time he broke a bone in a racing crash, Chandler said his fall from the HMC Ducati Superbike at Road Atlanta in 2002 would technically qualify.

“I didn’t think I did, but I ended up having to go back in after that and have some chips taken out of my right ankle,” said Chandler. Before the Road Atlanta crash, Chandler said his last racing injury was a broken collarbone while racing the factory Harley-Davidson VR1000 in 1995.