“With my best doctor. I would like to once again thank Dr. Pedro Ripol and Ruber International Hospital for everything.

With a 23-word post and photo with daughter Mr. Sergio Araujo last Friday, he left the operating room with a smile and the confidence that this adventure is over. The 31-year-old AEK captain can once again set goals for his career, knowing that science has done its job.

However, the 70-year-old Spanish traumatologist P. Ripoll is not just a doctor who will perform a normal operation on a football player. The Argentine union striker, who worked for Spanish club Las Palmas, put his professional future in his own hands when he suffered a serious ligament and cartilage injury in his left ankle. With all due respect to the leading orthopedic surgeon and the former glory of AEK, Lucky Nicolaou, head of the PAE medical team, he made it clear from the very beginning that “I have my own doctor.”

But who is Dr. Pedro Luis Ripoll, who is blindly trusted by the biggest stars of world football, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Xavi Alonso, James Rodriguez, Pepe, Marcelo, Frankie de Jong, Raul Albiol, when will their misfortune knock on the door? door” inside the playing fields?

He is a doctor without a driver’s license, not because he does not like cars, but because from Monday 9 am to Saturday 7 pm he can be found working in Murcia, Madrid, Almeria or Alicante. “I think I will constantly cause disasters, because before each operation I only think about my patients. Therefore, I prefer to travel around Spain by taxi. Their drivers have become my best friends…” says the presenter with a smile, and now the most innovative orthopedic surgeon in the world, according to many.

Together with orthopedic surgeon Mariano De Prado, he founded the Ripolli De Prado sports medicine center with five clinics throughout Spain, which have been certified by FIFA since 2013 and are considered the best in the world in the treatment of sports injuries.

But above all, we are talking about an advanced scientist who, after 42 years of medical practice, still faithfully observes the Hippocratic Oath. The “soldier” of medicine, for whom going to the operating room is a rite of passage.

“I never go outside the day before the operation because I want to have the operation in the morning. I usually eat pasta, drink a bottle of protein in the morning and sleep in good temperature conditions and, most importantly, without noise. When I get into a taxi on the way to surgery, I always think that I have a great team and I will act like it’s the last time in my life. How should I do my best because it’s a battle of myself with my own limitations. This is my mental workout,” he says.

His statistics are staggering. He performed thousands of surgeries achieving improvement in nine out of ten patients with knee and ankle injuries. An eminent professor of orthopedic surgery and traumatology calls his devotion to patients “slavery”.

Every day he makes dozens of phone calls and sends messages to his patients to see how their recovery is going. This is his own medicine, and he confesses: “I think I was born a doctor.”

First surgery at age 12

In Jumil, his place of origin, he accompanied his grandfather, Dr. Antonio José, carrying his bag to visits to the doctor, and at the age of 12, he helped his father, Don Salvador, by passing material to his patient who had undergone knee surgery. “I believe that from my grandfather and father I inherited their honesty and their humility towards the sick,” he says, admitting that he was stigmatized, but at the same time the loss of his beloved sister Lolita showed him the way to medicine. The fact that he reverently follows his rules, he owes to the fact that he entered the Jesuit school in Valencia at the age of nine and left at the age of 17.

“The Jesuits gave me a very comprehensive, competitive and open education because we had access to everything that was censored in the Franco era. They taught us to speak well and be disciplined. Every day we had to get up at 6:30 in the morning.” After leaving, he entered the medical school of the University of Murcia, where classmates gave him the nickname “El Gordo” (fat).

“I was a great athlete, but I put on twenty kilos because of my studies I stopped doing shot put and football, which were my favorite sports,” he admits.

He then studied at the Complutense University of Madrid with a degree in molecular biology, completing his education in the US and Switzerland. He has worked in various institutions such as CSIC and the Center for Molecular Biology of the Autonomous University of Madrid, he was a member of the Department of Developmental Genetics at the School of Madrid when he was Director General of Scientific and Technical Research.

In 1989, he received his first international Videomed Award for pioneering cruciate ligament surgery. She made a splash after that. performing the first ever meniscal transplant in Spain in 2001., in a patient from Almeria. In August 2006, together with Mariano de Prado and Javier Vaquero, he achieved another milestone by becoming the first doctor in the world to treat femoral head necrosis with adult stem cells. This minimally invasive technique in musculoskeletal surgery earned Ripoll the Fundación Mapfre “Advancement in Applied Traumatology” award, awarded to him by Queen Sofia in 2008.

He served in the public health system but resigned at the age of 36 “because I needed to see a hundred patients in two hours.”

Always committed to innovation from the very beginning of his career, in order to avoid government bureaucracy, he paid for a 100-kilogram arthroscopic machine out of his own pocket and rode with it on the Murcia-Madrid train! In the late 70’s and early 80’s he began to act as a traumatologist after a successful meniscus arthroscopy, which he performed on Alejandro Sagardui from Cartagena and Juanjo from Real Murcia.

Ripoll’s altruistic leanings never left him, as through the Amical Foundation he takes care of people who can’t afford it. Three years ago, Ripoll and De Prado SportClinic entered into an agreement with the insurance company AXA to conclude contracts for amateur and semi-professional athletes, under which, for 45 euros per month, they can be monitored by a medical team that also monitors La Liga players every week .

Cartilage problem and Go5D

The knee cartilage is another problem for him. “This is a tissue that does not regenerate and we are still struggling. This is an unresolved issue. In the area of ​​articular cartilage, I will focus on using indifferent cells or mesenchymal stem cells to try to replicate tissue similar to the original,” he told El Espanol.

His latest technique is “Go5D” which works like a joint electrocardiogram, creating four biomechanics labs. “This allows us to accurately measure knee and ankle instability, as well as foot structure and human body axes. In this way, we get information that is compared with the data of 4.5 million mobile devices found in big data. With this completely objective and reliable information, we can develop a strategy for working with the patient. This is a medical revolution because, until now, clinical evidence has been based only on the experience of the doctor. Now we have something that complements it, reducing the subjective interpretation of x-ray studies, ”he said during the presentation of the technique.

The first athlete it was applied to was former NBA ace Pau Gasol in May 2019, where he underwent surgery on his left leg after breaking his navicular bone.

Forecast for Ronaldo.

Two years ago, a Spanish professor predicted that Cristiano Ronaldo would be able to play without problems until the age of 40. And he justified it, knowing his physique better than anyone.

“His biological age is much lower than his current 36 years. I think he can play until he is 40,” he told Marca. In fact, he mentioned that the Portuguese has gotten better over the years. “He has very cleverly changed his physique, the way he plays and his movements over these years.In the early years, he was very concerned with muscle explosion, strength and speed, and then developed into a well-trained and well-organized physical model.His personality helped him grow as a pro a lot.As for Cristiano, I would emphasize his desire to win.He is never satisfied and demands a lot of oneself Beyond genetics, the brain is the key to being a champion It is the foundation and then intelligence, the ability to understand reality, to know that your physical conditions are changing, and to be able to adapt and make the most of them “.

He also explained why Cristiano has always been respected by injuries: “He is very resilient. I laughed at the goalkeeper who, with the ball in the trap, tried to stop Ronaldo with his hand and dislocated his shoulder. That is his strength,” he said.

Sport has always been a constant in Ripoll’s life, along with his passion for opera. He “devours” books and sports newspapers, and running along the banks of the Segura River in Murcia and the Retiro Park in Madrid are his favorite habits. Don’t think about retirement yet.

“I go to America and see how 80-year-old doctors work great, and then they run. This is a revolution that Europe still has a taboo on. I don’t want to say anything that can be misinterpreted, but people who want to should keep working. Physicians and especially surgeons would benefit from renewing our operating licenses every five years. People should be as useful as possible in order to give something back to society. I will do it as much as I can.”