Michael Scott | February 26, 2020
Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
It’s Hard To Start, Harder To Stop
It’s always been pretty hard to get to the top in motorcycle GP racing.
For a start you need that special combination of talent and determination. The levels of each can vary (riding skills, for example, can be natural but can also be learned), but the sum total of them needs to be formidably large.
Then you need an entry pass. These are not generally obtainable without considerable expenditure, even for the most talented riders, although the very lucky ones are those discovered early on by talent-hunting managers with links to wealthy sponsors. Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez, for example, had big guys paying the bills from their earliest road-racing years. By contrast, Casey Stoner and family had to suffer many deprivations before notable Svengali Alberto Puig picked him up, and the Brad Binder family coffers were heavily raided to get Brad where he is today. His father is a successful industrialist in the South African mining industry, and without his support it is highly likely that Brad might never have reached the GPs.
But this column is not about how hard it is to get to the top in racing, but how hard it is to leave it.
There are currently two very trenchant examples, both champions and race winners of great renown.
Most poignant is the case of Rossi. Is it that he doesn’t want to stop racing, or that he doesn’t know how to stop? It’s all very well for fans to take offense whenever I wonder whether it might be time for him to call it a day, but I do so only out of concern for his safety. He really has nothing left to prove. Yet he still wants to prove it. Talent, as we said, and determination.
More puzzling is the case of his old bête noire and once hated teammate Jorge Lorenzo.
Like Valentino, Jorge sought to revive his own motivation by switching to Ducati from Yamaha. Unlike Valentino, Jorge achieved success (on a considerably improved motorcycle). Then, with masterfully awkward timing just as he started winning, Ducati made it uncomfortable for him to do anything but leave.
Lorenzo’s forced move to Repsol Honda was both brave and intriguing but went horribly wrong, as his butter-smooth style clashed with the bike’s need to have its neck wrung. His 2019 season was ghastly to watch, and obviously even worse to experience. Already battered by the Ducati, Jorge’s attempts to tame the RC213V bashed him up so severely that the 32-year-old star finally limped to the conference table at the final round to announce his unexpectedly early retirement.
While he (mostly) maintained an icy calm, it was an emotional occasion. And one of the emotions was relief. A crescendo of pain and injury was going to come to an end. He had reassessed his life, and explained: “I have always said that life is not only about bikes, but I didn’t think yet what I will do in the future. I will have a long vacation somewhere sunny this winter.”
Lo and behold, after his long think, he got back on a MotoGP bike.
It was in a testing role on the Yamaha M1, that he had ridden for nine years, three titles (the last as the only rider to defeat Marquez) and 44 of his 47 wins, which he described as “probably the best time of my career.”
Of course, he was quick: running just one of the three days of Sepang tests at the beginning of February, at less than 1.4 seconds off the best time of new Yamaha white hope Fabio Quartararo. On a bike he hadn’t ridden for the past three years.
Yamaha pounced and scored a coup. They were wise to snap him up (astonishingly, Honda released him from the second year of his contract without a clause forbidding it). His silky riding style is much like that of Quartararo, and his development skills will thus be highly valuable.
But there will without doubt be wild card rides during the season, and potentially replacement rides in the case of injury.
Not so easy to stop then, Jorge?
Over the past 30 years, there have been 10 champions: Wayne Rainey, Kevin Schwantz, Mick Doohan, Alex Criville, Kenny Roberts Jr, Valentino Rossi, Nicky Hayden, Casey Stoner, Jorge Lorenzo, and Marc Marquez. Of these, only Criville, Roberts and Stoner have voluntarily retired.
Criville was fading anyway, suffering a debilitating illness; Roberts’s decision was rational but also influenced by the lack of a good ride. Stoner’s retirement came at just 27, at the peak of his form, and was a characteristically wilful act by a famously stubborn superstar.
The rest had their careers ended by crashes (Hayden’s, however, not on the track).
Retiring voluntarily from the top, it seems, is at least as hard as getting there. CN
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