Austin Forkner Announces Retirement from Racing
Austin Forkner went to social media today to announce his retirement from racing, effective immediately, as he did not race the RedBud National over the weekend as he mulled his decision to step away. You can watch Austin's entire statement from his Instagram below.
Forkner retires as a winner of 13 250F supercross races, which ranks him in a tie for fourth all time. He won all of those races as a member of Monster Energy/Pro Circuit Kawasaki. His speed and talent from both the amateur ranks into the pros were never in question, but his title chances were hampered by massive injuries, starting in 2019 when he tore his ACL after starting the 250SX East season with three-straight victories. He battled Dylan Ferrandis down to the final round for a title in 2020 but came up short when he crashed on a jump and suffered internal injuries. Then came more injuries but also assorted wins, including a feel-good comeback victory in Foxborough in 2022.
Forker was ready for more in 2023, but a brutal crash off the start of the Anaheim 1 opener left him with more knee problems and another lost season.
By 2024 he was ready, again, and started the year with a victory at the 250SX East opener in Detroit, and was leading round two in Dallas when he mistimed a rhythm section and went flying off the track and hard onto concrete. As Forkner explains in his video below, he was already dealing with strange nerve issues in his arm that led to a loss of muscle and feeling. In that race, he lost a contact lens in his eye, so he failed to land the rhythm properly. Then his hand slipped off the bars and caused the crash.
That crash changed Forkner's life, and career. A massive concussion set him back, but during scans for his head injury, doctors also noted something even more serious. Austin explained it in an interview with CNN during his comeback to racing for 2025.
“Last year, after the crash where I broke my back and my shoulder and I was knocked out for like five minutes, they were doing scans on my head and they found out that I had something called an AVM (arteriovenous malformation),” Forkner explains. “And I actually had to have brain surgery to have that taken out.”
AVM is a tangle of blood vessels that typically forms during fetal development and leads to irregular connections between arteries and veins in the brain. While many people born with AVMs live normal lives without even noticing, such malformations can be dangerous, even fatal if left untreated.
Forkner's wife was also pregnant with their first child as he worked through the AVM surgery. In his video, he explains that he feels, personally, that this was a sign from God, using dirt bikes and the injury to reveal the AVM that he might never have known about otherwise. He also says that the Arlington crash had left him "heartbroken" because all of the hard work had again been washed away.
In addition, Forkner mentions multiple surgeries on his arm, including using the same doctor that helped Ken Roczen through his arm injuries, but nothing has really provided any improvement.
Those reasons--the arm issues, the Arlington crash, the AVM, and his family, are what led Austin Forkner to step away. With his talent, he makes for one of the great "what if" stories of the sport, as he could, right now, be amongst the front runners in the 450 class if his career had gone in a different direction.
Forkner's video is below.
