Yes, Dan Wheldon died doing what he loved to do. Yes, racing cars at speeds in excess of 200 mph is dangerous, and those who do it know it.
And yes, his death in a fiery 15-car crash Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was so horrific that the word "carnage" kept coming up in news reports.
Those are the boilerplate observations. More appropriate at the moment is a discussion of the person he was.
Wheldon was 33 years old, and a two-time Indianapolis 500 winner, including this year. He flaunted none of that. He looked you in the eye when he shook your hand, he asked questions as well as answered them, and he had a sense of humor that included a taste for others who also had one.
Last Tuesday, Wheldon was on a promotional swing, creating media attention for the unique challenge he was attempting at the Las Vegas race. He would start last in a field of 34 and try to make his way all the way to the front at the end. If he did so, he would share $5 million with a randomly selected fan.
He was quick to put the promotion, and its gimmick aspects, into context.
"I don't need money to be the incentive," he said.
Others in sports' saying that would prompt an eye roll. Wheldon, young, movie-star handsome, and ideally positioned to say something like that and not mean it, really did. After you've done several hundred interviews, it becomes easier to separate the hot dog from the bun.
The interview took place at a Los Angeles restaurant. Wheldon was double-teamed by two sportswriters, both veterans of this and both longtime friends inclined to needle each other between questions. Wheldon seemed to enjoy the shots taken and given by Doug Krikorian, longtime Long Beach Press-Telegram columnist. He kept score and announced it at the end.
He was remarkably less full of himself than most athletes who had accomplished things on his level. Two Indy 500s can turn a walk into a swagger quickly. Wheldon just walked.
With little prompting, he talked much more about others than himself. A situation came up where he had taken over a car from driver Alex Tagliani for a recent race in Kentucky. He was asked why Tagliani would give up that ride.
Wheldon's wasn't the only car to get airborne. Will Power's did, too, and still pictures of it flying gave the appearance of the photograph being doctored.
While Wheldon suffered fatal injuries, Power escaped with only a sore back. He was similarly taken to nearby University Medical Center for observation and later released.
Rookies JR Hildebrand and Pippa Mann were hospitalized, their areas of concern not revealed. IndyCar officials said Mann has a hand injury.
Townsend Bell, Tomas Scheckter, Paul Tracy, EJ Viso, Alex Lloyd, Buddy Rice, Vitor Meira and rookies James Jakes, Charlie Kimball and Jay Howard also were involved but not injured.
"It was chaos," said Lloyd, who drove the car that Power vaulted over. "All of a sudden the whole track just gets lit up (with fire)."
Paul Tracy said the video he saw showed Wheldon hitting his back wheel and flying "over the top of me."
"It was a horrendous accident," Tracy said.
The rest of the field made one more lap around the 1.5-mile track before being called to pit road. The debris that came sliding off the high-banked second turn was almost too vast to describe. There were smoldering pieces scattered across the backstretch. Smoke billowed.
"It was like a movie when they're trying to make it as gnarly as possible," Danica Patrick said.
"I've never seen anything like it," Ryan Briscoe said. "The debris we all had to drive through the lap later, it looked like a war scene from Terminator or something. I mean, there were just pieces of metal and car on first in the middle of the track with no car attached to it and just debris everywhere. So it was scary."
The 34-car field represented the largest IndyCar has seen outside the Indianapolis 500, which Wheldon twice won. Every car in qualifying circled the oval in the 50-second bracket. Helio Castroneves said he saw a lot of drivers "dodging each other" in the race.
Said Cunningham: "In this kind of racing there's not much room for error. I'm not thrilled about it."
Dario Franchitti, who won the season title with the race ruled incomplete, said he and other veterans had warned IndyCar that the mixture of speed (upwards of 220 mph), banking and driving inexperience was volatile, but he said an evaluation of Sunday's mess will be reserved for another day.
Hinchcliffe said series officials understood the risks and did as much as they could to minimize them.
"At the end of the day, the series isn't stupid," he said. "They've been around racing a long time.
"If one small thing goes wrong, it has very bad consequences."
A return to this track next year is scheduled Oct. 14, and IndyCar will come with safer cars. Wheldon helped develop the prototype, but he'll be missing.
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