Dream of returning to Dakar keeps CS Santosh going

After a near fatal crash in the rally in January, India's ace rider says returning to compete in the world's toughest rally remains his biggest motivation.

Thirty minutes after a call to CS Santosh went unanswered, he rang back.

CS Santosh

“Hi! I’m really sorry I couldn’t get back earlier,” he said. “Luckily, I have your number saved. I want to ask some stupid questions because the thing is, I don’t remember the last two years. Have we met before?”

This was a strange, delicate moment; this correspondent has met and interviewed India’s top motorcycle rally driver several times. But Santosh, 37, was involved in a life-threatening, high-speed crash in the 2021 Dakar Rally that left him with brain trauma—and partial memory loss. “The last two years… I don’t remember much anymore,” Santosh said from his home in Bengaluru.

On January 6, Santosh was flying towards the hills and sand dunes that dot the landscape between Wadi ad-Dawasir and Riyadh, 135km into the 813km-long fourth stage at Dakar Rally when his bike suddenly hit a rock, catapulting him off his vehicle.

He was lucky that another rider spotted him almost immediately after and pressed an emergency button that alerts organisers to a crash. Within 15 minutes, he was being airlifted to a hospital in Riyadh. For eight days, he was in a medically induced coma to allow the brain to heal, and was flown back to Bengaluru in a heavily sedated state to continue his treatment and rehabilitation.

Though the accident left no major physical injury to the rest of his body—apart from a dislocated shoulder—the concussion led to both memory loss as well as loss of motor skills.

“When I woke up (in Bengaluru) I thought it was a dream for sure,” Santosh said. “I thought — what is my girlfriend doing here? What are my parents doing here? What am I doing in India?”

He had no memories from the Dakar Rally. He thought he was still training in Spain, where he had spent six months before heading to the rally, and was confused to find out that he was in India. “I didn’t even realise I had crashed. It took me close to a month to realise it wasn’t a dream, that I actually went through something in my life,” Santosh, the first Indian to compete and complete the Dakar in 2015, said.

“That is when it started to hit me that ‘Santosh you need to accept the possibility that they are saying the truth and it’s not a dream’. Nobody other than my doctors can understand me. It was the strangest thing I had to go through in my life.”

Long road to recovery

Then began a long road to recovery. Withdrawing from public or social engagements, Santosh spent time with his family, trying to bridge the gaps in his memory, looking at photographs and videos from the past, putting names to faces, and relearning about events and occasions.

To his surprise, one memory stood out in how vividly he could recall both observed details and felt emotions—the 2015 Dakar Rally, his first.

“I was most emotional about the 2015 Dakar. That’s why I remember so much about it. I remember I was the first Indian to do it, the memory of the stages, the difficulties I went through that year, I remember that in detail,” said Santosh, who has raced in seven Dakar rallies, the most by an Indian.

For many other things in his life, including the subsequent rallies—he finished a career-best 34th in Dakar 2018 which was then the best finish by an Indian—the memories are yet to cohere.

“It’s like you see a picture and relive only the moment it was taken. You don’t relive the moment before it, what got you to it, what happened after; you don’t know any of those things. You’re just living one picture at a time,” Santosh said.

For a few months after the accident, Santosh also battled a feeling of great fatigue. Even though he was hardly interacting with people outside his family, sometimes even a short conversation would make him very tired. Doctors suggested antidepressants. Initially averse, Santosh started taking the pills about a month ago.

“My mind is so much better now. I can have conversations,” Santosh said.

“A month ago is when I started to feel that I can be back to [being] CS Santosh. There were two people in me because I didn’t know where CS Santosh was. Now I know where he is, I can see that in me.”

The physical recovery has been difficult too. Between the brain trauma, the induced coma, and the weeks spent in bed, even basic motor skills had become challenging. In April, just before a lockdown came into force due to the second wave of the pandemic, Santosh was shifted to Italy for rehabilitation at a sports medicine centre in Bologna.

“Rehabilitation for five hours a day…for months that’s all I did. Like a child, I had to be taught how to hold a ball, how to coordinate your hands, legs, getting them to work together so that you can achieve small tasks… I couldn’t do that, whatever the task maybe; to hold or reach for something. I was laughing at myself because I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t do the stupidest exercises,” said Santosh. “I also have double vision in my eyes for which I’m getting eye therapy. Doctors have said that this should heal or at some point I might get an operation. I am so weak that I can’t even do a push up. I am taking those steps, trying to learn how to do everything…”

Back in the saddle

With his memory returning slowly and his physical rehab showing progress, Santosh started riding a cycle in July. In August, he took a big step—he got on his Hero Xpulse bike for a short off-road exercise in Spain. It was the first time he was on a bike since the accident.

“The one thing I had not forgotten was the feeling the motorcycle gives you when its tyres roll on the dirt,” he said. “You feel the vibrations going through the body, it felt just like yesterday. It made me feel human. The bike was the easiest aspect of everything that’s going on right now.”

His father concurred about the progress. “On a scale of 1-10, he is at 8 right now and very likely he’ll be 10 on 10 in the next three months. The two marks are for his memory which he is slowly regaining,” said C Shivshankar.

Santosh returned to India at the end of August to attend his sister’s wedding.

The most decorated and accomplished off-road rider from India, Santosh is no stranger to terrifying crashes. His body has several scars—not blemishes, but reminders of his daredevil profession. One massive one runs like a tattoo from his neck to shoulder. He acquired it on his first attempt at cross country rallying at the 2013 Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, when a fuel leak ignited the bike.

In the following years, he dislocated vertebrae, suffered hip injuries and concussions — but none of those managed to derail his driving career like the current injury did.

Yet, it is thought of racing again that motivates Santosh to keep getting better.

“I realised I want to be in the Dakar,” he said. “It is the only motivation in life. I am to start practising on my motorcycle in the next few weeks to slowly start riding. Then we will see.”