Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
Marc’s Greatest Rival? Old Father Time
As the season approaches halfway, the Marquez camp will be working hard on keeping calm. I don’t mean the rider. He somehow seems to rise above such considerations. Too intelligent, a career of astounding success tempered by a single but profound major setback has taught him to be philosophical. To take those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as they come.
Or so he says.
Of course, he cares. And in the future, he might attach more importance to the numbers than he currently professes: his 68th MotoGP win at Assen equaled Agostini’s 500cc-class victories, and he is closing on the 89 of all-time leader Valentino Rossi, who took such pains to make Marc his deadly enemy.
The current anxiety belongs to his fans. Because it is in the nature of the sport, of any sport but particularly a potentially injurious one like motorcycle racing, to snatch success away without warning.
Added to this is the unavoidable intervention of Old Father Time—humanity’s implacable mutual enemy. At 32 (33 next February), he is the second-oldest rider in MotoGP. Only Johann Zarco, 35 on July 16, is older. At the other end of the scale, Pedro Acosta, 21, and his own protégé, Fermin Aldeguer, only 20. Both podium finishers.
For now, Marc has the measure of both, and the other 19 MotoGP grid-fillers to boot. When he can’t outride them, as when injured at unfavored Assen, he can out-think them instead. To prove the point, he set only the fourth-fastest lap at the Dutch track and was very seldom more than three-tenths ahead over the line. But he was always ahead, and more importantly, still there when it mattered.
All this means that we are witnessing something very special. Marc is not the only genius in the history of the sport. There is a short but definite list of them, including but not limited to Duke, Surtees, Hocking, Hailwood, Agostini, Roberts, Doohan and Rossi. Not forgetting the all-time great duplex rivalry of Rainey and Schwantz.
The common thread goes beyond the mundane matter of riding skill. (Mundane only in the company of giants, of course.) This can be learned and polished. The more intelligent one’s understanding, the more it can be refined. There will always be levels of skill, and the function of sport is to measure these levels. (Motorcycle racing adds a complicating intervention: the quality of the motorcycle, but again, intelligence helps a rider to find the best one.)
So, not the only genius. But even in this company, one of the greatest.
Marc had a virtual stranglehold on the title from his rookie MotoGP season in 2013. Apart from a single slip-up in 2015, when Lorenzo took the glory, largely because of a misstep by Honda. It came to an end in 2020 with the broken arm at Jerez and remained out of reach through a combination of his own eagerness to return before fully recovered and the gradual decline of his Honda.
Catharsis came in a crash-strewn 2023, with the big decision. Marc cancelled his multi-million-dollar Honda contract (at who knows what financial cost) and pressed the reset button with the private Gresini Ducati team. It transformed his life and his attitude to racing. Or at least he says as much. From now on, the main target was simply a matter of enjoyment. Success could come or not, as fortune dictated.
Clearly, however, we can see there is more to it than that. His return to victory at Aragon last year was the touchstone, the vote of confidence from Ducati’s biggest bosses the catalyst, as they overturned their riders’ ladder by dumping Martin (and the Pramac team) in favor of hiring Marc.
The consequence is this year’s quest to regain the title that slipped away from him with his broken arm in 2020.
The first half of the season has been nothing short of magnificent—mistakes (aka “crashes”) at his favorite circuits of COTA and Jerez notwithstanding. They cost him 46 points (he remounted for 12th at Jerez), but he still arrived at last weekend’s German GP 68 points clear of his nearest rival, brother Alex, and 126 from teammate Pecco Bagnaia.
He left the Sachsenring with these margins still further extended.
But there is a lesson to be learned from the rival who was absent during this marvelous first-half campaign: defending champion Jorge Martin. A succession of injuries, the last of them rather serious after he was run over at Qatar, means that one rider who might have been challenging Marc for race wins simply wasn’t there. He is due to return next week at Brno, but with a lot of catching up to do. A factor for wins, possibly, but not for the title.
Should Marc miss a few races, it could overturn everything. And that’s why the anxiety is starting to peak. CN
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