Main image by Jacob Souder
Phoenix Honda’s Kyle Peters thought he was done racing after a bad crash last year. The three-time AMA Arenacross champion was moonlighting in Monster Energy AMA Supercross when he went down hard in St Louis. Well, you can’t keep a good man down and KP healed up and even captured another AX title this season. We caught up to Peters on the PulpMX Show to tell us about that, his injury, and more.
Racer X Online: Congrats, man. This one might have been the hardest title yet. I don't know. You tell us.
Kyle Peters: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. It’s hard to even put it into words. Just everything from my injury almost a year ago and the recovery respect, to not knowing what was going to happen, what I was going to do. So, this one is definitely the most special.
You crashed in supercross last year. You have neck and back [injuries], you've got a cage around you. You broke some vertebrae. It was serious stuff. You were not for sure going to come back racing.
Yeah, for sure. I wasn’t sure for a long time. April 9th of last year at St. Louis, I burst fractured C5 and C6 in my neck. Went into surgery the next day. At the time, I didn’t have any feeling. I could move everything, but feeling was pretty much shot. I had surgery the next day. Two rods, ten screws. Fused from C4 to T1, so six vertebrae. Still to this day, I still have a bit of nerve damage. My feeling is a little spotty in some areas, but I couldn’t be any more blessed to still be able to go out and ride my dirt bike and do what I love.
At what point did you make your mind up, like, “Okay, this is it?” Even though you had feeling back, you were on the road to recovery, were you still like, “Nah,” on dirt bikes? Or when did you say, “I’m coming back to ride?”
Initially, my whole recovery aspect, I loved to mountain bike and go surf and snowboard and stuff. So that was my goal. I just wanted to be able to go do the things I want to do and live my life still to the fullest. So initially, that was the goal. Get back to living a normal life. Then as I was getting better, I was like, I feel like I could probably ride. My first ride on the bike was on a corner track, incredibly slow. I don't know how I didn’t fall over. From that point on, I was like, I could probably do this. Initially, my mind wasn’t even focused on dirt bikes. I was like, I’m cool. If I can live a normal life, dirt bikes, it will be okay. I’ll get over it. But they bring us all back in. [Laughs]
It’s also good of Phoenix Honda to say, hey, if you want to, if you’re ready, we’ll hire you again. You don’t see that loyalty all the time from teams.
Yeah, for sure.
Did you have another year in your deal?
David [Eller, team owner] and I kind of go year to year, the Phoenix team and I. The whole time I was telling him, I’ll be back, for sure. In the back of my mind I’m like, “Man, I don't know. I’m going to try, but we’ll see.” Even up until the week before round one, a week or two before, he was like, “Are you sure I don’t need anyone else to come and ride?” I’m like, “No, I got it.” But in reality, I was like, I had no idea how this was going to go. We’re going to ride this wave.
Are you signed up again for next year? Are we taking our fourth title off into the sunset?
Bud Man’s [Buddy Antunez] at five, so I feel like I got to try to beat him. He’s got a hundred and something wins now. That’s a lot. Bud Man, I’m coming after you.
Watch the full interview with Peters on episode #538 of the PulpMX Show, starting below at the 2:35:01 mark.
