NEW DELHI: When Rishabh Pant was brought to a Mumbai hospital with life-threatening injuries after his horrific car crash in December 2022, the first thing he asked was: “Will I be able to play again?” — recalled renowned orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Dinshaw Pardiwala, who led his treatment.Pant was driving from Delhi to his hometown, Roorkee, on December 30, 2022, when he lost control of his vehicle. The car crashed into a divider and caught fire, leaving the Indian wicketkeeper-batter with multiple serious injuries.
He was dragged out of the wreckage by passersby. Reflecting on that moment, Dr. Pardiwala said, “Rishabh Pant was extremely lucky to be alive — extremely lucky.”Recalling the condition in which Pant was admitted, Dr. Pardiwala told The Telegraph: “When he first came in, he had a dislocated right knee. He also had an injury to his right ankle, lots of other minor injuries all over. He had a lot of skin loss, so his entire skin from the nape of the neck down to his knees was completely scraped off in the process of that accident.”“Then getting out of the car — that broken glass scraped off a lot of the skin and the flesh from his back,” he added.The road back was long. Pant endured 635 days of recovery, including multiple surgeries, intense physiotherapy, and unwavering determination — culminating in one of the most inspiring comeback stories in modern sport.“To be in an accident like this, where the car actually overturns and blows up, the risk of death is extremely high,” said Pardiwala, speaking shortly after watching Pant smash back-to-back centuries in the opening Test against England at Headingley.The surgeon added that Pant was fortunate not to lose blood supply to his right leg — a common and dangerous complication with such injuries — which could have led to amputation.
“When your knee dislocates, and all the ligaments break, there’s a high possibility of the nerve or the main blood vessel also being injured. If the blood vessel gets injured, you typically have about four to six hours to restore the blood supply. Otherwise, there’s a risk of losing your limb. The fact that his blood vessel wasn’t injured despite having a severe high-velocity knee dislocation was extremely lucky,” Pardiwala explained.Pant’s first concern after being admitted was clear. “Am I ever going to be able to play again?” he asked. But his mother had a more grounded question for the doctor: “Is he ever going to be able to walk again?”Pardiwala described the severity of the damage: “We had a lengthy discussion about the fact that these are grievous injuries – we would need to reconstruct the entire knee. Once we reconstruct the entire knee, we’re going to have to then work through a whole process of letting it heal, letting it recover, then get back the basic functions – the range, the strength and the stability.”On January 6, 2023, the surgeon performed a complex four-hour surgery, reconstructing three ligaments and repairing the tendons and meniscus in Pant’s right knee.
The initial days were the hardest. “He lost a lot of skin, and so he couldn’t really move his hands. They were completely swollen. He couldn’t really move either of his hands initially,” Pardiwala said.Pant couldn’t even brush his teeth at first. But over time, he began to recover — drinking water on his own and eventually walking without crutches after four months. Despite the signs of progress, Pardiwala admitted he wasn’t sure if Pant could ever return to professional cricket.“Typically, when we reconstruct these patients, they are happy just to get back to normal life. If they can walk and do some minimal amount of recreational sports, they’re happy,” he said. “I said: ‘We can certainly make sure that he walks again. I’m going to try my best to make sure that we can get him back to playing again.’ We didn’t really want to offer him too much initially, but we did want to give him hope. So I said: ‘We’ll break it down into steps.’ Step one, of course, has to be the surgery.”“When we discussed it just after the surgery, the way I told him is the fact you’re alive, the fact that your limbs survived – that’s two miracles down. If we get you back to competitive cricket, that’s going to be a third miracle. Let’s just hope for everything, and then take it a step at a time.”But Pant was driven — and determined to return. “His question then was: ‘OK, assuming that we do manage to get there, how long is it going to be?’ I said: ‘Probably looking at 18 months to get back to competitive cricket.’”Pant spent most of 2023 at the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore. His recovery was faster than expected.
“His whole aim was ‘Get me back to normalcy as fast as possible’. And we were trying to make sure that we were doing just the optimum, not too little, but not too much. His recovery was much faster than we had anticipated. He was like: ‘Nothing is too much.’ He pushed harder than normal people,” Pardiwala said.From a crash that nearly ended his career — and life — to walking back into the Indian dressing room as a match-winner, Rishabh Pant’s journey has been nothing short of miraculous.
