| December 27, 2015
You can read the original magazine story by clicking HERE.
Story and Photography By Steve Cox
Red Bull KTM’s Ryan Dungey has become much more than a motorcycle racer. This isn’t a surprise, really, as it’s a pattern that has tended to hold true throughout the years: Racers hit the pros between 16 and 19 years old, and it’s usually after their 25th birthday that they finally put life and racing in their proper perspectives. But Dungey is stepping it up a notch as compared to his predecessors. Sure, he’s still doing everything he can to win (and managed to win both the 2015 AMA 450cc Supercross and 450cc Motocross titles), but his motivation and his perspective have definitely changed.
Read it for yourself here:
IDOLS
To understand where Dungey has ended up, it’s usually good to start out with who he looked up to when he was starting out as a racer.
“In the beginning, it was obviously Jeremy McGrath,” Dungey said. “When I first watched Supercross, he was the guy winning everything. And it wasn’t only that he was winning, but I think as a young kid he was a big name and they talked a lot about him, so I learned a lot about him. I was probably 7 or 8. And then gradually came Ricky [Carmichael]. As funny as it is, I looked up to guys like Ricky. I never raced Ricky. And Stewart; James Stewart—you’ve got to remember, when he turned pro I was probably 12. So I was pretty young, I never really thought I’d race against a guy like him.”
Even cooler than that, though, is that when Dungey was a kid racing in the KTM Junior Supercross Challenge, he got to watch Kevin Windham win the main event. Then, seemingly a lifetime later, he got to race Windham.
“Kevin Windham!” Dungey said. “I was in the KTM Junior Supercross Challenge on a 50 in 1997. I remember watching him dominate the race that night. I would have never thought I’d race against Kevin Windham, but it depends how long their careers are. It’s pretty interesting, really.”
STAYING POWER
Seeing Windham hang around long enough to race against him—for a few years, actually—has left a lasting impression on Dungey. Windham was the kind of racer who, if he trained as hard as Carmichael, would’ve likely been done racing long before Dungey got a chance to race against him. He’d have gotten burned out. Carmichael, by comparison, was done racing by the time he was 27. Windham was about 29 at the time, but he raced for more than six years after Carmichael retired.
“Everybody’s different,” Dungey said. “What makes some people tick doesn’t necessarily make other people tick. So it’s interesting. Sometimes you wonder, could it have been different if they had a different perspective? Could they have gone longer? Maybe. Would they have been as dominant? I don’t know. It all depends. I think in our sport you can be successful—when I say ‘successful’ I mean you can win races—but it’s about how much pressure are you going to put on yourself and how much is that going to weigh you down? So it’s not like it’s a bad thing, but it’s just the constant grind and people expecting you to be there. People expect you to win. You expect yourself to win. It’s like that expectancy, that’s when you feel the pressure and that’s when you put pressure on yourself. You don’t do it for anybody else but yourself, but there’s a lot that comes with it. There’s a big load if you want to be a dominant guy. It’s a lot to handle.”
And once you’ve set your sights on winning championships at the top level, and demonstrated your ability to do so, it turns out that it’s not really less stressful to be out of championship contention. And that’s pretty interesting, as most would assume that you can just go out and have fun if you don’t have to worry about points so much.
“Honestly, not winning the championships, those are probably just as stressful as winning them,” Dungey said. “It’s a lot of pressure if you’re not performing, because you want to know why and so do all the people who are depending on you to win. And on the other side, when it’s boiling down and you’re in a championship hunt, then here comes the pressure. And then it’s like, how do you handle that pressure? That’s where you mentally have to stay strong. You’ve mentally got to stay focused. Knowing that you can’t afford a hiccup, but also that you can’t think about that. You’ve got to stay focused on the here and the now. I’ve learned a lot. My first championships I probably could have thought a lot less, especially at the end of the process when it was coming time to wrap it up. But it’s something you work so hard for, it’s such a fine line. You prepare in your mind. You go over, and over, and over. But championships, I think a lot of people treat it like it’s easy, like, ‘Oh, he’s so good, he just pulled off a championship, that’s cool.’ But it’s tough work. It’s one of the hardest things in our sport to do once, much less consistently. You’ve always got guys who are coming to try and knock you off the top as well. It’s a heavy load. The number-one plate, there’s a lot that comes with it. It’s like, ‘I can’t believe it, I’m in this situation, and I don’t want to buckle under the pressure.’ That’s one way of looking at it, like a burden. Or you look at the situation and you’re like, ‘I’d rather be in this situation doing something I love than working 9-5 at a job I don’t like.’ It’s all perspective.”
And another part of having staying power in the pros is to make sure you prioritize your life properly. It’s a lot easier to eat, sleep and breathe racing when you’re 17 and it’s all new to you all the time. It’s something else when you’re in your mid-20s, have won a bunch of titles, and you’re looking for some time to recharge your batteries.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what you’re feeling when you’re burned out,” Dungey said. “We were talking earlier about how a career could be longer, but with our sport, it really is just a year-round thing. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s not the type of thing you can do into your late-30s and your 40s. We as riders have to remember it’s a short career and you got to make the best of it. Even though the grind gets tough now, it’s going to make you better in the future. You have an opportunity to set yourself up to have a family and to take care of them and be a little bit more financially set up, too. There are a lot of positives. A guy like myself, I’ve invested too much time not to make the most of my professional career. It’s constantly training every day and the riding. Lots of riding every week.”
But at his age now, Dungey knows that if he wants to stay competitive during the racing season, he needs to make the most out of his very limited time off.
“We get about two full weeks off a year, which is fine—I wouldn’t change anything—but you definitely make the most of those times, when you’re away from your job and away from your training, to spend with your family and friends,” Dungey said. “You’ve got to enjoy it. There’s a lot of good in this deal, and we get to travel a lot of places, a lot of cities, get to see a lot of cool things. There’s a lot of complaining in the sport but in the scheme of things we’re pretty spoiled and we’re in an awesome position. But spending time with my family—my wife—is really important to me.”
So, for the people who were wondering why Dungey sat out this year’s Motocross of Nations in France, it’s about these newfound priorities. Don’t forget, he raced the MXoN six years in a row prior to this year’s event.
“After the fact, my brother had it recorded, and I did watch it,” Dungey said. “But that’s another scenario that shows exactly how burnout develops. And that’s why I felt like it was best to sit out the des Nations, because so many years that I’ve done it, and I ignored the feeling that I should take the time off, and then I go race. Then I get back and then I get my time off, and well it wasn’t enough time and I’m already right back to it. It’s about resting your body and your mind. If you don’t do that and you don’t prepare. I owe it to myself and my sponsors and the people around me to be at A1 100-percent, healthy, fit and ready to go, but also mentally recharged and ready to go after another season.”
And more people benefit from Ryan Dungey’s success than the people you think about. We’ll get into that shortly.
TRAINING POWER
There was a lot of discussion early in 2015 about Dungey beginning to work with trainer Aldon Baker. With the hundreds of stories written about Baker’s racers, starting in 2001 with Ricky Carmichael, it used to be kind of a novel thing to point out that Baker is undefeated as a trainer with racers who finished their AMA championships (didn’t drop out injured), but at this point, more than 15 years after he began working with the GOAT, it’s no longer a novelty. Baker is still undefeated as a trainer as long as his racers complete their championships. That’s every championship Ricky Carmichael attempted from 2001 until 2006 (missing only the 2004 AMA Supercross Series with a bad knee), followed by every championship James Stewart completed in 2007 and 2008, every championship that Ryan Villopoto completed from 2009 until 2014, Ken Roczen’s 2014 450cc National Championship, and now both 2015 titles for Ryan Dungey. It’s almost unbelievable. Dungey is heading into his second year with Baker in 2016.
“It’s definitely been awesome working with Aldon,” Dungey said. “I’ve got nothing but good to say about the guy. He’s got a great history, a great track record of working with other riders, and he’s got a lot of knowledge and experience in the sport that has been able to help me. Working together, there’s just a sense of calm and a sense of confidence about him being there and having him behind me and in my program. The best thing is, as far as working together, I put that all into his hands as far as the riding and the training, and I trust him with that, which is huge for me. I don’t have to think about it. I can just do it 100 percent. He obviously looks over all the information from data and heart rates and everything like that, so he can manage the body. He can see how things are working. It’s amazing what he can tell through all that. And then obviously the information that I give him, he deciphers it and then we make the best decision going forward. It’s just nice to be able to put more of my attention and focus towards my preparation.”
And a great side effect of Baker’s training is that Dungey can maximize his time with his family.
“You can enjoy life a little bit more, actually,” Dungey said. “We’re so hard at the grind that that time is already minimal. When you start cutting into that time with your wife and your family and friends, then it gets kind of tough, especially through a long season. So it’s been huge in that aspect.”
RACING IN PERSPECTIVE
And here’s where it all comes together: Ryan Dungey is not only an adult, he’s a good man, and his racing has brought some things into his life that he hadn’t ever thought about before. A few years ago, Dungey began a charity cycling event to benefit St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in his home state of Minnesota.
“You know, you come home and you’re stressed out because your job, or you’re worrying about this or that, but then there are multiple kids in St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital who are fighting for their lives. They’re fighting cancer. I’m worried about my job but there are much bigger worries in the world, for sure. And that’s hard. It puts things in perspective pretty fast.”
When he was young, just as with basically all racers, Dungey believed everything hinged on his results on the track. Now, he realizes that’s still true, but it isn’t. Let him explain:
“In the beginning of my career, I made racing so important, but it’s not,” Dungey said. “God is first, your family is next, racing’s far down in that line, way down at the bottom of the list. After my grandmother had passed away from cancer, we’d been able to start a foundation after her and a charity bike ride we do every year in Minnesota. It’s called the Minnesota Major, and 100 percent of the proceeds go straight to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. We’ve been able to visit there a couple times and it’s very humbling. You see these kids and they’re five, six, seven years old and they’re battling for their life. It makes things seem really small really fast.”
As true as that has to be, racing is still a priority, just for a different reason. When Dungey was young, racing was important for his own, personal gain. He wanted to win. Now, his wealth and influence are helping children fight through cancer. Without the income and fame that come from racing—from winning, really—he couldn’t help them like he has.
“I’ve been blessed with what I do but I want to be able to be a blessing to somebody else and give back,” Dungey said. “It might only be a little bit in the scheme of things as far as dollars or my time, but with all of us together we can make a pretty good dent. It’s hard. It’s very hard to see that stuff. I watched it firsthand with my grandmother, who was older, to fight cancer and die right in front of me. These little kids haven’t even gotten to live their lives. That’s what I came to realize: what an amazing position I’ve been put in. Because of racing, I can make an impact. I can help somebody. I can be a good role model to the kids coming up. I can be a good sport ambassador. These are things I want to do for more than just selfish reasons [as it was when he was young]. It’s humbling and kind of sad some of the things that we put as priorities in our life.”
Dungey is a Christian man, and he has come to embrace what that really means.
“I think at the end of our life we’re all going to be asked, What did you do with it?” Dungey said. “God’s going to ask, What did you do with what I gave you? I want to make sure that I made an impact and did everything I could with every opportunity and every position I was put in to benefit His will and not mine.”
And ultimately, that’s the difference between teenaged Ryan Dungey and today’s Ryan Dungey: What he thought he wanted as his legacy back then isn’t even really a thought today.
“In all honestly, in the beginning I thought I wanted to be remembered for what I did on the track,” Dungey said. “But within the last five years, it would be the opposite. If I live 80 years and the first 25, 30 years I spent racing dirt bikes, I still have 50 years to go. After 50 years, nobody’s going to remember what I did on the track, so I’d rather be remembered for what I did off it. We’re not going to take our trophies with us.”
New Bike, New Life
It’s no secret that Dungey struggled with his bike setup quite a bit after he made the move from Suzuki to KTM, 2011-2012. He and his team made a lot of improvements through those years, but the big result of the testing came later.
“From 2012 through 2014, we definitely made a lot of progress from the beginning to the end of that bike at that time,” Dungey said. “But it was one of the toughest things I had to go through. There was a lot of stuff that I never was able to say. We were trying to figure a lot of stuff out. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Everybody was doing their work the best that they could with what we had. KTM was investing a lot of time and money into making things better, too, but there were a lot of struggles.”
That’s life, in a nutshell. The struggles are what make the successes so much sweeter. If not for the bad, how could you recognize the good? Not only that, but the struggles with finding settings on Dungey’s first KTM 450 SX/F led directly to the 2015 KTM 450 SX/F Factory Team Edition. KTM was always listening and developing a plan, and after three years, Dungey was presented with a much-improved KTM 450.
“In the end, those struggles make you better,” Dungey said. “I think the benefit out of all of that, we were able to take the notes and learn so much and all the feedback from the riders in the U.S. on Team Red Bull KTM to Team Red Bull KTM in Europe, MXGP riders and the R&D guys. So, everybody came together. KTM has a smart group of people who work there at the factory. They were able to build something better.”
And Dungey says it was better in almost every way imaginable.
“When a factory builds a bike, usually you gain in one area, but you lose a little somewhere else.” Dungey said. “That wasn’t the case [with the new bike]. There were positives all the way around without any negatives. With that came a lot of more comfort on the bike. The suspension started working better. As they were building this new bike, they were obviously testing chassis, but then they were testing suspension, linkages, chassis setups, engines. They really did their homework and brought to the table a better bike, which was really cool.”
Now, to be clear, when racers are racing for factory teams, the entire point of paying a guy like Ryan Dungey millions of dollars to race their motorcycle is to sell motorcycles. There’s something lost in translation in this area, because on one hand you can’t have factory racers disparaging their motorcycle, as that would be antithetical to selling them. On the other hand, if the racer is struggling with finding comfortable settings, at that level, that literally has absolutely nothing to do with what the average rider would feel on one of these bikes.
“What I believe is that there’s no bad bike; it’s the team of personnel around you,” Dungey said. “Even though at times my bike, whether it was 2012 to now, anytime my bike wasn’t working for me, there was never a point I ever thought, ‘This bike’s a piece of junk, it’s never going to be good.’ There was never a point I thought that. I always had hope that we were going to find it. That’s what keeps you going on the grind. That’s where a lot of riders get messed up, and then they get a bad attitude. ‘The bike’s a piece of junk.’ Once you think that, then you don’t care anymore. You can’t keep grinding away if you think you can’t win on the bike you have anyway. You’ve already mentally lost on the track. Everybody’s better than you because you say your bike sucks. And you got to be careful because you can’t let that mentality creep up on you. It’ll steal your confidence. So for me there was always hope.”
Bottom line? In the end, the struggle left him a better racer, a better test rider, and a better person.
“But through all those hard times I can literally say it made me a better rider, it made me a better tester, it made me more grateful to be where I am at today and to have a good bike that I do,” Dungey said. “Everything goes into the learning. Everything is a learning experience. You got to take the positives from everything and leave the rest.”
You can read the original magazine story by clicking HERE.