Alex Zanardi Made Resilience Look Like a Competitive Sport

Zanardi Made Resilience Look Like a CompetitionMondadori Portfolio - Getty Images

There’s resiliency, and then there was Alex Zanardi resiliency.

For most people, that word means adapting to adversity, coping with tragedy, and somehow dragging yourself toward a new normal. Zanardi took that definition, stuffed it into the exhaust pipe of a race car, and launched it into orbit.

Where others would understandably stay grounded, Zanardi climbed higher. Higher than fear. Higher than limitation. Higher than what the rest of us thought was even remotely possible. Mount Everest wasn’t a metaphor for him. It felt more like a warm-up lap.

He gave adversity the Italian equivalent of a raised middle finger and showed the world what resilience actually looked like.

Here was a man who reached the pinnacle of motorsport, only to lose both legs in a horrific crash at Germany’s Lausitzring in 2001. Doctors weren’t even sure he would survive. Most people would have considered simply waking up each morning afterward a victory. Zanardi wasn’t interested in simply surviving. He intended to live. Fully. Loudly. Relentlessly.

Fitted with prosthetic limbs he found unsuitable, he effectively tossed them aside and helped design his own. Then he taught himself to compete on a handcycle and became a four-time Paralympic gold medalist. Because apparently losing your legs was, for Alex Zanardi, merely an inconvenient pit stop.

Most people would have wheeled quietly into the sunset and accepted their version of a new normal. Zanardi refused. Just two years after the crash, he was back behind the wheel competing in the European Touring Car Championship. While others might have settled for existing, Zanardi was too busy living enough for everybody else in the room.

In 2019, Zanardi returned to the United States to compete in the Rolex 24 at Daytona, not for a ceremonial appearance, but in one of the toughest endurance races in the world. A 24-hour event where survival often matters more than trophies.

The first glimpse many Americans had of him that week came when he zipped into the Daytona International Speedway press room on an electric scooter, weaving effortlessly through a sea of reporters before parking himself at the stage with a grin that suggested he was enjoying every second of the chaos.

And that was Zanardi. He radiated something rare. Not sympathy. Not pity. Energy. Joy. Defiance.

Throughout the weekend he posed for photos, signed autographs, and spent time not just with fans, but with some of the best drivers in the world, many of whom looked at him with the kind of admiration normally reserved for astronauts or war heroes.

He and his team finished ninth in the GTLM class that year. Far from victory lane, perhaps, but in another sense it felt like the biggest win in the entire field.

Throughout the 2019 Rolex 24 weekend Zanardi posed for photos, signed autographs, and spent time not just with fans, but with some of the best drivers in the world.Icon Sportswire - Getty Images

“If someone can receive some type of inspiration from what I do, it fills my heart with pride,’’ Zanardi said. “But all I can do is tip my hat and continue my journey.”

In 2020, that journey was slowed again after another devastating accident while competing in a handbike event in Italy.

Alex Zanardi’s journey ended Friday at the age of 59. Abruptly, it seems. And perhaps fittingly, snatched away with the same brutal speed as the race cars he once drove. But his spirit, his example, and his impossible refusal to surrender will long outlive the headlines announcing his death.

“After the accident, I came to the conclusion ... you wonder why? Why? Why? How does that happen to someone like that?” Jimmy Vasser, his former teammate in the CART, now IndyCar series, said in 2019. “I finally decided that you know what, it happened to Alex that way because he needed to show everybody how you’re supposed to handle it.”

Alex Zanardi didn’t just redefine resilience. He turned it into a full-throttle life philosophy the rest of us will spend forever trying to live up to. Grazie and buon viaggio, Alex.