Michael Schumacher accident: Ralf Schumacher offers rare ...

Ralf Schumacher has commented on the fate of his brother Michael, almost 10 years on from his life-changing skiing accident.

The seven-time F1 World Champion was involved in a skiing accident while on holiday with his family 10 years ago this winter, resulting in the German suffering serious head injuries.

Following a spell in hospital, Schumacher emerged from his coma and was withdrawn by his family to continue his recovery at home. Since then, radio silence has been maintained by the Schumacher family, with only piecemeal vague snippets of information hinting as to the true severity of his condition – an example being Mick Schumacher’s admission that he was not able to call upon his father’s wealth of knowledge during his own F1 racing career.

While Michael lives away from the public eye with his family in Switzerland, his brother – former F1 rival Ralf – has kept in the public eye through his media work and punditry with Sky Germany.

Recently, the lawyer for the Schumacher family commented on the maintained veil of silence surrounding Michael, with Ralf also choosing to carefully comment on the situation in an interview with German publication Bunte.

“Life is unfortunately not fair, sometimes,” Schumacher said.

“We have to accept it.”

The younger Schumacher was a vocal critic of Guenther Steiner and Haas during his nephew Mick’s tenure with the American team, and said that he maintains a close relationship with Mick and his sister Gina-Maria, as well as Michael’s wife Corinna.

“When I see the two of them, my heart laughs,” Schumacher said of his niece and nephew.

“If anyone in the family seeks my advice, I’m there. They go their [own] way.”

This week, family lawyer Felix Damm said the health condition of Michael has been closely guarded as a ‘final announcement’ wouldn’t end speculation or guarantee privacy.

Damm said doing such an update has been considered, but it was determined that a “final report” would not give closure to the situation, as the press would continue to search for fresh updates as time passed.

Asked in an LTO interview if the desire to be left alone explains why there has been no definitive Schumacher health update, Damm replied: “It has always been a matter of protecting private information. Of course, we had a lot of discussions about how to do that.

“We also considered whether a final announcement about Michael’s state of health could be the right way to go about it. But that wouldn’t have been the end of it and there would have had to be permanently updated ‘water level reports’. Because as a person affected, it is not in your hands to order the media to draw a line under the matter.

“The media could take up such a report again and again and ask: ‘And how does it look now?’, one, two, three months or years after the report. And if we then wanted to take action against this reporting, we would have to deal with the argument of voluntary self-opening.”

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