Can teenage motocross sensation Yuvrajsinh ride into history?

Yuvrajsinh with mum Swaroopa and dad Sandeep

At first glance, Yuvrajsinh Deshmukh, 13, comes across as a quintessential teenager. He loves watching documentaries, is an ardent follower of Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo and loves playing with dogs. But what separates Yuvi (as he's lovingly called at home) from the average teen is his love for speed combined with risk-taking on his motorbike.

Yuvrajsinh, who trains in the US twice a year, made a pit stop in Mumbai recently. "I get restless if I don't ride my bike even for a day. It's on my mind 24/7," Yuvrajsinh tells mid-day during a chat. He was a toddler when his parents, Swaroopa and Sandeep, first gifted him a bicycle. "We noticed that he was never afraid of going into puddles," says Swaroopa. When Yuvrajsinh turned three, his father Sandeep, an amateur motocross rider himself, who couldn't follow his passion due to lack of parental support, gave his lad a Yamaha PW 50cc bike. "He would try to manoeuvre the bike between two trees," recalls Swaroopa.

Yuvrajsinh Deshmukh

It wasn't long before his parents realised his calling and gave him the nod to pursue a career in motocross racing. The decision was a hard one, as the risks involved were high. And Yuvrajsinh, who studies in Std VIII at Symbiosis International School in Pune, has already witnessed two career-threatening injuries. On May 20, 2015, days before boarding his flight to the US for training, Yuvrajsinh broke his collar bone at the Kamshet track near Lonavla. Rustom Kersi Patel, an eight-time national motocross champion and head coach at Ajmera Racing India, who has been training Yuvrajsinh since his childhood, says the boy's insistence on getting his landing right caused the injury. "He took the first double and didn't land on the slope. He landed ahead, but was committed to the second one, so went on. Again, he was supposed to land on the slope, but didn't, and instead toppled."

The following year, another scary injury came about - on February 21, 2016 - while Yuvrajsinh was training at the Jebel Ali racetrack in Dubai. He broke his femur bone. "When I rushed to the crash site, he was crying. He was in deep pain. The Dubai paramedics said that he was in no position to be taken by road, so a chopper was called in and Yuvrajsinh was airlifted to the hospital," coach Patel recalls. He was operated upon the next day.

Yuvrajsinh isn't rattled by these accidents. "Would you stop taking the road, if your car met with an accident?" he asks. "My logic is similar." Yuvrajsinh is currently training hard in a bid to finish on top of the podium at the 2021 MX GP - equivalent to the Motocross World Championship. He does three to four sessions of 15 minutes each across the racetrack. "Until I become a World Champion, I won't stop," he says.

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