RAINEY’S parade

Thirty years ago, Wayne Rainey swept to a third successive world championship, his dayglo-and-white Yamaha YZR500 the current king of the generation of 500cc two-strokes christened ‘the unrideables’. The Californian racer with the surfer-dude looks was on top, in a racing era where courage and determination were at a premium.

The following year, 1993, while on course for a classic fourth consecutive title, the beast bit him. A strange crash, which he later explained as “a front-end highside”, sent him looping and tumbling through the gravel at Misano. He didn’t get up. A fractured vertebra left him lucky to survive, but paralysed from the chest down.

In the shocking aftermath, while Misano