Rishabh Pant's car blew up and he stared death in the face, says surgeon who saved him

Telegraph

4 hours ago

'Rishabh Pant was extremely lucky to be alive – extremely lucky.'
Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala, the orthopaedic surgeon who treated the Indian cricket superstar after his car crash, is in no doubt about his fortune. 'To be in an accident like this, where the car actually overturns and blows up, the risk of death is extremely high.'
On December 30, 2022, flamboyant wicketkeeper Pant – who made history by scoring two centuries in one Test against England at Headingley – drove from Delhi to his home town of Roorkee. At 5:30am, Pant lost control of his car on the Delhi-Dehradun highway. His vehicle skidded for 200 metres before hitting the road divider.
While the Mercedes burned, Pant's right knee twisted at 90 degrees. 'My time in this world is over,' Pant thought to himself, he later said. He was just 25 years old – a year older than James Dean when he suffered his fatal car crash.
But Pant and two passers-by broke open a window to allow him to escape before the car set on fire. Pant was hospitalised with major injuries to his head, back and feet. After a week in local hospitals, Pant was airlifted to Mumbai.
'When he first came in, he had a dislocated right knee,' Pardiwala recalls. 'He also had an injury to his right ankle, lots of other minor injuries all over. He had a lot of skin loss, so his entire skin from the nape of the neck down to his knees was completely scraped off in the process of that accident. Then getting out of the car – that broken glass scraped off a lot of the skin and the flesh from his back.'
If Pant's first great fortune was to be alive, his second was that he still had his right leg at all.
Injuries so grievous he could not brush his teeth for weeks
'When your knee dislocates, and all the ligaments break, there's a high possibility of the nerve or the main blood vessel also being injured,' Pardiwala explains. 'If the blood vessel gets injured, you typically have about four to six hours to restore the blood supply. Otherwise, there's a risk of losing your limb. The fact that his blood vessel wasn't injured despite having a severe high-velocity knee dislocation was extremely lucky.'
When he met Pardiwala in Mumbai, Pant's first question was: 'Am I ever going to be able to play again?' His mother's first question to Pardiwala was simply: 'Is he ever going to be able to walk again?'
' We had a lengthy discussion about the fact that these are grievous injuries – we would need to reconstruct the entire knee,' Pardiwala recalls. 'Once we reconstruct the entire knee, we're going to have to then work through a whole process of letting it heal, letting it recover, then get back the basic functions – the range, the strength and the stability.'
On January 6, 2023, two days after he arrived in Mumbai, Pant was put under general anaesthetic. Over the next four hours, Pardiwala performed surgery on his right knee, reconstructing three ligaments and repairing tendons and meniscus.
For several weeks after the surgery, Pant's movement in his upper body – the area which had been far less affected than his legs – remained so debilitated that he could not brush his teeth without assistance. 'He lost a lot of skin, and so he couldn't really move his hands. They were completely swollen. He couldn't really move either of his hands initially.'
It was weeks until Pant could even grip a glass safely to drink water without assistance. For four months after the accident, Pant could only walk with crutches.
'Typically, when we reconstruct these patients they are happy just to get back to normal life,' Pardiwala explains. 'If they can walk and do some minimal amount of recreational sports, they're happy.' But Pant's sights were altogether higher.
Pardiwala 'really didn't know' whether Pant could play for India again. 'I said: 'We can certainly make sure that he walks again. I'm going to try my best to make sure that we can get him back to playing again.'
'We didn't really want to offer him too much initially, but we did want to give him hope. So I said: 'We'll break it down into steps.' Step one, of course, has to be the surgery.
'When we discussed it just after the surgery, the way I told him is the fact you're alive, the fact that your limbs survived – that's two miracles down. If we get you back to competitive cricket, that's going to be a third miracle. Let's just hope for everything, and then take it a step at a time.
'His question then was: 'OK, assuming that we do manage to get there, how long is it going to be?' I said: 'Probably looking at 18 months to get back to competitive cricket.''
After surgery, Pant remained in hospital for another 24 days until he was discharged. He remained in Mumbai for a further three weeks, staying in a hotel near the hospital.
Then, Pant moved into accommodation by the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore, by the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium. This would remain his home for most of 2023.
Pant returned to the Academy gym virtually every day, doing two sessions with physiotherapists or strength and conditioning coaches. Initially, these sessions were two hours each; within weeks, at Pant's request, they extended to 3½ hours each. The regime was a combination of strenuous exercise in the gym and long sessions of aqua therapy in the swimming pool. The programme had three phases: restoring range of movement; strengthening muscles; and finally regaining balance and agility.
'His whole aim was 'Get me back to normalcy as fast as possible',' Pardiwala remembers. 'And we were trying to make sure that we were doing just the optimum, not too little, but not too much.
'His recovery was much faster than we had anticipated. He was like: 'Nothing is too much.' He pushed harder than normal people.'
Pant defied prognosis by four months
From the very first discussions that he had with Pardiwala in Mumbai, Pant made it clear that he intended not only to return to elite cricket, but also to regain his place behind the stumps. This aim made his recovery programme more onerous.
'As a wicketkeeper, you have to squat hundreds of times a day,' Pardiwala explains. 'So we needed to get that capability.'
Pardiwala recalls a conversation between Ricky Ponting, who was then his head coach at Delhi Capitals, and Pant. Ponting suggested that Pant initially return as a specialist batsman alone.
'Rishabh turned around and said: 'No, there's no way that I'm getting back to elite-level cricket as just a batsman. I want to enjoy my keeping and so I'm not going to get back just as a batsman, I will get back when I can bat and when I can keep wicket too.''
Pardiwala had originally told Pant that the best scenario was to make a full return within 18 months. Yet he made his return in a warm-up within 14 months of the crash. In March 2024, 14 months and three weeks after the accident, Pant returned to professional cricket, in the Indian Premier League.
Pant got an emotional standing ovation as he walked out to bat for the first time. Unassumingly, he regained his form from before the crash, averaging 40.5 in the 2024 IPL season and keeping wicket in every match, too. 'He was diving around like crazy,' Pardiwala recalls. When he made his Test return, against Bangladesh, Pant marked his comeback with a century.
WELCOME BACK TO RED BALL CRICKET AFTER 21 LONG MONTHS, RISHABH PANT...!!!
- A swashbuckling 34 ball fifty by Pant. pic.twitter.com/CQs7p0HwFz
— Mufaddal Vohra (@mufaddal_vohra) September 7, 2024
While Pant, now 27, is as ebullient on the field as before his crash, he is a subtly different person off the field now. 'He recognises the fact that he was extremely lucky to be alive,' Pardiwala says. 'He's so motivated as a cricketer.
'If you knew the Rishabh before this happened, he's a much more mature human being. He's very philosophical now. He appreciates life and everything that goes around it. That typically happens to anyone who's faced death in the face. Someone who's had a near-death experience often gets life into perspective.'
Pant's enforced break could ultimately mean that he plays more for India. Shane Warne's year-long absence from international cricket, for very different reasons – he was banned for a year for taking a banned diuretic – lengthened his own career.
'I'm sure he's going to be fitter now because he's realising the importance of it. A lot of athletes become much better after a big surgery than ever before.
'The difference is fitness levels. They were never exposed to those kinds of high levels of fitness and rehabilitation; even if they were exposed to it, they didn't understand the importance of it.
'He always worked at his fitness, I'm sure, but I think he worked more at his skills initially, and probably a little less at the fitness part of it. But now he realises the importance of fitness. So he's working out and making sure that all aspects of his body are strengthened enough. I think that gives him then the confidence to do what he does on the field.'
So much confidence, indeed, that Pant celebrated the first of his twin centuries at Headingley with a hand spring: the same celebration that he used to mark a century in the IPL last month. The pyrotechnics reflect one of Pant's childhood loves.
Rishabh Pant reaching 100 in the Rishabh Pant way 🔥6️⃣
"This fella is BOX OFFICE." 🍿 pic.twitter.com/Uq0nX12CFm
— Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) June 21, 2025
'Rishabh trained as a gymnast – and so although he looks large, he is quite agile, and he does have a lot of flexibility,' says Pardiwala. 'And that's why he's been doing those somersaults of late.
'It's a well-practised and perfected move – unnecessary though!'
But not to a man with Pant's sense of theatre.