The Dutchman Edwin Straver, who had been in a coma since last week due to an accident suffered during the Dakar Rally, has died due to the damage suffered in that accident, according to local radio Omroep Brabant.
The 48-year-old rider crashed while riding at 50 km / h during the penultimate stage of the Dakar, played on February 16 in Saudi Arabia, when he was in the thirty-eighth position in the third overall classification of his career.
As a result, the upper vertebra of the neck was broken and suffered brain damage that has finally proved too serious. Thus, last morning he died at the Dutch hospital where he had been admitted since last Wednesday.
This is the second fatality that claims the recent Dakar Rally after Paulo Gonçalves. The experienced Portuguese pilot, who was contesting his thirteenth Dakar, suffered a fall during the seventh stage that resulted in a cardiorespiratory arrest and was taken by helicopter to a hospital in the area where he died.
Straver is also the number 30 in a long list of pilots who have lost their lives in the motorized adventure par excellence. Since the French motorcyclist Patrick Dodin became the first victim of the Dakar in its first edition, in 1979, the competition has only lived two cheerful, four-year streaks, without having to regret any fatality, between 1998 and 2001 and between 2015 And this Sunday. The last pilot killed until Straver and Gonçalves, both in this edition of the Dakar, had been the Polish Michal Hernik , who was found dehydrated in 2015, and in the previous years the Argentine Jorge Andrés Martínez, the Frenchman Thomas Bourgin and the Belgian Eric Palante died. .
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