Alex Zanardi Dies at 59 — How Did Alex Zanardi Die After Four Golds
Alex Zanardi dies aged 59, and how did alex zanardi die is inseparable from the crash that changed his life in September 2001. The former Formula One driver and two-times Cart champion later rebuilt himself into a Paralympic winner, collecting four gold medals as a hand-cyclist.
Zanardi’s 2001 Lausitzring crash
He was racing at Lausitzring in north-east Germany when he lost control while exiting the pits, spun across the track and was hit broadside-on by Alex Tagliani. The impact sheared Zanardi’s car in half. He almost bled to death, lost all but one litre of his blood, and suffered amputations of his left leg at the thigh and his right leg at the knee.
Doctors Terry Trammell and Steve Olvey helicoptered him to an intensive care unit in Berlin, but his heart stopped three times before he arrived. Six weeks after the accident, he was out of hospital and starting rehabilitation.
BMW, Prosthetics and a return
Zanardi learned to walk with prosthetic legs and later designed his own bespoke limbs. In 2003, he went back to Lausitzring in a car with specially modified controls and drove the 13 laps he had failed to complete in 2001. Between 2003 and 2009, he drove for BMW in the European and World Touring Car Championships and won three races for the team.
He kept racing after that. Zanardi appeared in the Blancpain Sprint Series in 2014 and drove in the 24 Hours of Daytona in January 2019, extending a comeback that had already moved far beyond rehabilitation.
Handcycling titles and Paralympic medals
His second act reached another level in endurance sport. After being invited by his sponsor Barilla pasta, he entered the 2007 New York marathon on a handcycle after three weeks of training and finished fourth. He later won marathons in Venice, Rome and New York.
Zanardi won two golds and a silver medal at the 2012 London Paralympics, then repeated the same medal haul at the 2016 Rio Paralympics. Born in Castel Maggiore near Bologna in Italy, he had already built a motorsport career that began with three go-kart titles in Italy and the European championship over seven years, before joining the Italian Formula 3 series in 1988. He married Daniela Manni in 1996.
His death closes a career that crossed Formula One, touring cars and Paralympic sport, but the facts that define him stay fixed: the crash at Lausitzring, the return on prosthetics, and the four gold medals that followed.
