Cristiano Ronaldo crashed his Ferrari into a roadside barrier on the way to training this morning. He wasn't hurt, but you can't say the same about the Ferrari.
Apparently Edwin van der Sar was driving along behind Ronaldo in his Bentley—they were in a tunnel near the Manchester airport—and was able to stop and give him a ride to training after he'd crawled out of the wreckage and spoken to police. Manchester United fans, there may be a song in this for you. Ronaldo, the man who totals his $350,000 sports car and doesn't even skip practice. Maybe just leave out the part about how he's also the man who plows his $350,000 sports car into the stationary wall of a tunnel.
The Guardian spoke to a witness who observed the extent of the damage:
[T]he front edge of the sports car had been demolished while one of the front wheels had sheared off and could be seen 200 yards away from the scene. A rear tyre was flat. The witness said: "I got there just after the accident had happened and saw the state of the car. It is amazing he got out of it without a scratch."
The police describe it as a road traffic collision ("A Ferrari has collided with a barrier in the tunnel," the spokesman said, in what may be the Run of Play Sentence of the Month) while Manchester United's club spokesman cuts off his strong language at "incident."
A Ferrari has collided with a barrier in the tunnel. I don't want to seem totally unsympathetic about this. I mean, it's only funny because he's alive.
This isn't the first time the word "incident" has been invoked to cover Ronaldo's car trouble:
November 2007
And back in 2005, covering another Ronaldo "incident" on the A538 near the airport, People chose to embellish the word "incident" with some throaty action verbs. HURTLED! PLUNGED! SMASHED! JINKED! BLAZED! (Jinked?)
July 2005
There's a chance he's not a very careful driver.
What are the odds that Citeh fans will be singing "Candle in the Wind" at Crissy during the next Manchester derby?
I'm sure Van Der Saar was chasing him down for his autograph…
You can be sure that Leo Messi and Kaka would ahve been hurt in a similar crash. more evidence that C Ronaldo is special.
It's not his fault Fergie doesn't give him enough time in the morning before practice. You try driving and putting on makeup at the same time, see how uncrashed your Ferrari winds up.
He wasn't hurt, but still rolled around on the floor for ten minutes.
Okay, that one gets the "why didn't I think of that" award.
oh shit
From today's Fiver:
A dark day, then, for the prancing horse, not to mention the flash car he was driving around in.
How about this one?
Unlike C Ronaldo, after a brief application of cold spray, the Ferrari did not magically recover as if nothing had happened.
[...] no other footballer who wouldn't have been diminished by all the ridicule that followed him (from me, too) after that. With Ronaldo, all that mockery seems to one side of the truth. Even if you can't [...]