Jake DeRosier Injured

This image first appeared in the August 15, 1909 Indianapolis Star. The occasion was coverage of the first motorcycle race meet at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
 
This image of noted motorcycle racing champion Jake DeRosier shows him on a stretcher after his near fatal accident at the race meet. He was severely injured during a match race with another star rider, Ed Ligenfelder, dubbed "the Champion of the West" by promoters. The accident effectively put an end to the race meet, aborted after frightening accidents and withdrawals by competitors who knew the track was not ready for prime time. By any assessment this race meet was a fiasco and a terrible start to the Speedway's motor racing history.
 
If you study this murky image you can see the stricken rider's head toward the right end of the stretcher. Behind the group of men you see a ditch lining the edge of the track with a man's back (white shirt) visible underneath the stretcher. He is obviously in the ditch. I believe he his working to extract De Rosier's Indian bike. If you look into another gap between the men around the stretcher and a second white shirted man following along with them you see what appears to be a portion of a wire spoked wheel - evidence of a bike.
 
DeRosier was among the very best known of the two-wheel racing stars of the time. DeRosier's story (I wrote the Wikipedia entry on him) was both heroic and tragic as his life ended far too soon. While De Rosier recovered from these injuries he would lose his life in February 1913 after several surgeries to address injuries from a 1912 racing accident.