Steve Cox | November 1, 2017
Cycle News Empire of Dirt
COLUMN
Long Time Coming
When it comes to punditry and bench-racing, we always think we know what’s going to happen before it does, don’t we? “This guy is going to dominate, obviously, because last year/week he…” But before 2017, how many people picked Zach Osborne to win both the Supercross and Outdoor Championships? Almost nobody. Maybe not even Zach Osborne.
The truth is there are a lot of guys who can win, but in the end, only a few actually do.
Coming into the 2017 Supercross Series, most people likely would’ve picked Joey Savatgy to win his coast, since he lost to Cooper Webb by a single point in 2016, and Webb had moved up to the 450cc class. Zach Osborne, to that point, had never even won a supercross main event. Others likely picked Jeremy Martin, in his premiere season with the GEICO Honda team. And still others likely picked Martin’s former teammate, Aaron Plessinger, who finished second to Malcolm Stewart in the East in 2016. Or even Martin Davalos who won two races in 2016.
But who picked Zach Osborne or Justin Hill to win a 250cc SX title in 2017?
Probably nobody. If I was asked about either of them, I’d have probably said something along the lines of, “Well, if either of them gets a win early and can get on a roll, they can win a title…” But I definitely wouldn’t have predicted that either of them would do that.
Osborne in particular was the weirdest case of the entire season. As a pundit myself, I’ve seen a lot of racers who ride hard, and show consistency, but win very little. The first guy I can think of like that was Timmy Ferry.
Ferry was a great rider, and his resume is in the top one percent of anybody who ever raced professional motocross, but sometimes it seemed almost like he was immune to winning. Even when he won his 1997 125cc Eastern Regional Supercross Championship, he did it without winning a single main event! But still, Ferry won a Motocross of Nations as a member of Team USA, and was always somewhere near the front, either on the box, or just off of it. His tenacity made him one of the first guys ever to lose a factory ride, race as a privateer, and then get another factory ride again. Before Timmy Ferry, this never happened. Once you lost a factory ride, you never got another shot. His consistency made him a great anchor on a factory team, because the teams knew that even if their star rider (in his case, Chad Reed, David Vuillemin, or James Stewart would qualify as the stars on teams he was on) was hurt, they’d still have Ferry putting in podium finishes.
Another guy like that is Brett Metcalfe. “Metty” could finish fourth place in any AMA National moto, on any brand of motorcycle, against any competition. I bet he still could. But there was always something about Metcalfe that kept him from taking that next step to the podium.
What I’m saying is that, normally, once a racer has been around for about 10 years or so, like Zach Osborne, without winning a whole lot (or anything), usually that’s just how they end up. They end up being a top-five guy who fights for podiums, but who will never win many (if any) races, and never win any major titles. (Ferry won a title, but it was very early on.)
I think there’s a reason for this: We all only have so much hope, or self-belief. After five or seven or 10 years of finishing third, fourth, or fifth, I think most racers just come to believe that’s where they belong. It’s not a conscious choice. It’s just where they end up. Finishing there, they make a decent living, usually start a family by about 10 years in or so, and things just kind of roll along.
But Zach Osborne didn’t do that. Zach Osborne kept pushing and pushing and pushing. Year after year, he kept pushing. On the outside, I (along with most others, I assume) just figured he was going to be like Ferry or Metcalfe. And this isn’t a criticism, to be clear. Timmy Ferry and Brett Metcalfe are/were great racers. They just didn’t win a whole lot. Only one guy can win at a time, after all.
But then Osborne won his first supercross in Atlanta, and repeated in Toronto, overcame some difficulties in Daytona to finish fifth, then won again in Indianapolis. He was on a roll. Then came Detroit, when he suffered a broken front wheel in a first-turn melee, and ended up scoring three points on the night.
And we all know about the astounding ride Osborne put in at the finale in Las Vegas to take the Eastern Regional Championship home, right?
From there, riding a high, Osborne went on to win the outdoor title, too. Prior to 2017, Osborne had won one AMA National, with a 4-1 in the mud of Budds Creek in 2016. But in 2017, even when things went bad—like they did when his bike started spitting smoke at Millville, or when he went down in the first turn at Budds Creek in the first moto–they didn’t go that bad. In both of those motos I mentioned, he finished eighth, then won moto two and ended up on the box.
Sometimes, people seem destined to win. But with Osborne, if it were destiny, you’d think it would’ve happened a decade ago. It was something else.CN