Harith Noah trying to “make the best” of recovery after Dakar crash, injury

In 2024, Harith Noah became the first Indian rider to win the Dakar Rally when he topped the Rally2 class. Unfortunately, his hopes of a repeat were dashed even before the first stage when he crashed in the Prologue.

Now back home in Kerala, he published a video on Wednesday discussing the accident and his injuries.

The 2025 Dakar was Noah’s sixth start, once again racing for Sherco TVS Rally Factory Team. Despite a “few challenges leading up to the Prologue,” he was not particularly worried as he was “trying to figure it out and put it behind.”

The Prologue was a 29-kilometer loop around Bisha, and testimonies from fellow Indian riders Jatin Jain and Ashish Raorane told him “everything is almost marked”, meaning reading the roadbook was not as important as when the rally began.

After the stage started fairly smoothly for Noah, he hit what he described as a “speed bump” made of soil, comparable to a steppe and “pretty steep in the desert,” 16 kilometers in.

“When you hit it, you expect the bike to kick you,” he explained. “I hit it straight, so that’s already a good thing, but it kicked me a little bit too much so I ran over the bars and landed face-first. It was so fast so I don’t really know, but I hit my face headfirst and then turned, I got back up immediately, went to the bike, picked it up, tried to continue.”

He started feeling pain in his left arm, shoulder, and wrist as he pressed on. However, he hoped he could soldier on despite the pain over the next few days, figuring that it would get better as the race continued.

Upon finishing the Prologue, 36th in Rally2 and 57th overall, the pain “started really kicking in” as he rode back to the bivouac.

“That’s when I started questioning what I thought before and I started thinking that maybe my Dakar is over and that it’s a little serious injury or something is broken,” he said. “As soon as I got to the bivouac, I couldn’t continue going with the bike because I couldn’t pull in the clutch anymore.

“I went to the medics, removed my gloves and then saw that the hematoma was pretty swollen up so I kind of knew that something is wrong and did an X-ray to confirm that my bone is broken.”

As it turned out, Noah had broken both of his wrists along with a broken fourth metacarpal bone, a clean fracture into two pieces, in his left hand. Because the rest of his hands were unscathed, he suspected the injury stemmed from a wrist device that slid down in his crash and smashed into the wrists.

He took a taxi to the airport, where he was flown to Riyadh before arriving in Kochi for surgery. The procedure was a success, and he was eventually allowed to remove his right cast though K-wires will remain in his left hand for “five to six weeks.”

“We are here now, and the best I can do is try to make the best of this second. I’m already trying to get back today,” he continued. “I started training a little, eating healthy and trying to get my keep my mind straight and look forward to the next Dakar.”