Ouch! His personal trainer injured Tsunoda with golf ball
F1 News
Formula 1 is a dangerous sport. Yet at the start of the season, Yuki Tsunoda was injured not by an accident with his AlphaTauri, but by a golf ball. The little Japanese owed the injury to the very man who was supposed to make sure he was as fit as possible.
Michael Italiano is the name of Tsunoda's personal trainer, and he was a guest on the podcast Pitstop. Their collaboration only started at the beginning of the current season. With a bit of bad luck for Italiano, it could have been over before it had even started properly. In preparation for the current season, Italiano single-handedly caused Yuki to walk around with a sore left eye for days.
Eye for an eye...
"Everything was looking really, really good. Yuki was super fit. So we've come into Bahrain, first race", the personal trainer, formerly working for Daniel Ricciardo, looks back. "So we've gone out, we've rolled the mats out and essentially like I have a golf ball and we use the golf ball to roll out the ball of our feet and just loosen up our feet. So he's rolling his feet and I've got the foam roller. So I'm rolling out my back. And then what he's done, he's grabbed the golf ball and he just lobbed it onto my shin. And I'm like, yeah, obviously it hurt, right? Because, you know, good thing about me and Yuki, we banter each other quite a lot. And I was like, okay, cool. You think that's funny? Okay, cool. No worries. So like I let him go. And then he starts, he took the foam roller, started rolling his back. So I grabbed the golf ball. And then as I was walking to get the sparky ball, I just like threw the golf ball over my, like I wasn't even looking. And I just thought, oh, I'll just lob it. And it'll probably get him in the shin or something. I've lobbed it. And he's like rolling on his back. And it hit him straight in the eye, like right eye. And I even heard the pop."
Tsunoda was in a lot of pain
Tsunoda rolled on the carpet in pain. Italiano panicked and immediately went to get ice. "So we started applying ice on it for about, yeah, five minute intervals for about an hour. Probably, I reckon after 35 minutes, he could slowly start to open it. By this point, we're leaving for the track in about two hours. And I'm like, oh no, this is not good. So I'm sitting there like… I've never apologised so much in my life."
"We used some eye drops. His eye was hurting for about 10 days after, unfortunately. So we did have to keep a close eye on it. But hey, I didn't lose my job."
Tsunoda drove to a respectable 11th position in Bahrain.