Poor Wilbur Brink never knew what hit him, at least.
He was 12 years old and playing in his front yard along Georgetown Road in Indianapolis when a car crashed heavily a few hundred yards away during the 1931 Indianapolis 500. One of its tires soared into the air and over the wall. It bounced across Georgetown Road. And then it killed Wilbur Brink.
And now he is forever linked in my mind with 13-year-old Peter Lenz of Vancouver, Wash., who died at Indy, too, on Sunday. Unlike Brink, he died an active participant, falling off his motorcycle during warm-ups for a U.S. Grand Prix Racers Union event. Twelve-year-old Xavier Zayat struck him, and Lenz died in an Indianapolis hospital a few hours later, at about 2 in the afternoon.
And here’s the question I have now, having thought about it for two days: Who was the greater innocent, Wilbur Brink or Peter Lenz?
If you read the Indianapolis Star you’ll be left with no doubts, because the narrative that columnist Bob Kravitz paints there, through other riders, is that Lenz died pursuing his dreams, and what’s so terrible about that? He knew the risks, the narrative goes. He was willing to balance those for a shot at the big time.
I have no problem with this, as far as it goes. I’ve made same argument many times before, when racers have died.
Adult racers, that is.
Lenz, however, was 13, and so whatever understanding he had of the risks were filtered through his parents and coaches and mentors. To suggest he had full adult comprehension of them on his own is ridiculous. I don’t care how long he’d been riding or how many trophies he’d won.
And that’s why there’s no way in God’s heaven he should have been within a nautical mile of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, except as a spectator.
Even the MotoGP riders found the place barely manageable over the weekend; reigning world champ Valentino Rossi fell four times on a track that, under a punishing sun and 90-plus temps, was both bumpy and treacherously slick. Yet children – and let’s make no mistake, children is what they are – were allowed to run around the place at 125 mph?
Lunacy. Absolute lunacy.
Here’s the crux of this deal: If the series Lenz was racing in is, as it’s been characterized, an entry-level series, what the hell was it doing running at Indy? Indy is an advanced-placement track, not an entry-level one. There is no way, none, an entry-level series should be running there. It’s like plucking a kid out of PeeWee hockey and suiting him up with the Montreal Canadiens.
Yet the kids ran there and Peter Lenz crashed and then Xavier Zayat ran over him, and now there are not one but two victims at a place that has seen its share of death. The toll is now 68, after 101 years. That includes Wilbur Brink, and now Peter Lenz. And, in a different but perhaps fundamentally crueler way, it includes Xavier Zayat, too.
Lenz’s death is tragedy enough. But what of Zayat, who essentially killed him? Can you imagine having to carry that around inside you at that age? Or any age, for that matter?
In his column Monday, Kravitz wrote this: “We want to protect (our children), never let them cross the street, but in the end, we can’t expunge the risks, and we snatch away their dreams at our peril.”
I agree completely. We should never, ever, crush a kid’s dreams.
But what about the nightmares that come with them? What do we do with those?
