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A Broken Collarbone and a Black Eye
The final of the 2025 SuperMotocross World Championship will live long in the memory, and not necessarily for all the right reasons.
Instead of the tense but fair racing between three of the very best riders to ever do it—Jett and Hunter Lawrence and Eli Tomac—the night might be remembered most for the questionable behavior of one of the sport’s biggest stars and the flaccid inaction of the sport’s governing body, the American Motorcyclist Association.
Haiden Deegan is one of the most polarizing figures the sport has ever seen, and at just 19 years old, his speed is prodigious. He shoots his mouth off, but, for the most part, that’s fine; he backs it up. He’s clearly the fastest 250cc rider on the planet in both indoor and outdoor arenas, but he still has some maturing to do.
Earlier in race one in Las Vegas, Deegan, his back against the wall after a disastrous round in St. Louis a week ago, fought through the pack with alarming ease as title rival Jo Shimoda made haste in the lead.
Part of Deegan’s repertoire was a controversial jump into the sand section, which effectively cut a section of the racetrack and allowed a small but significant advantage.
From what I could see, Deegan was the only rider taking this line in 250 or 450, as the rest of the pack decided to race within the confines of the track. This is the first failing of the AMA. Deegan should have been reprimanded or at least warned not to do that anymore. You can’t just cut the track, no matter how small a gap it is.
With some level of predictability, it all went wrong when Deegan swooped on Ryder DiFrancesco, who was having his best ride of the season in third. DiFrancesco got a little sideways on the sand, and Deegan landed square on his head, knocking the GasGas rider out cold. The accident happened right in front of my 8-year-old son and I, and for a long time, I thought we’d just seen the first fatality in SMX. DiFrancesco eventually came to and groggily got to his feet to rapturous applause from a relieved crowd.
Did the AMA stop the race? No. Did Deegan show any concern about his colleague, whom he might have killed? Also no. Did the AMA sanction Deegan for putting his fellow competitor, DiFrancesco, in danger? Again, no.
That last part I find ridiculous.
Deegan, in my opinion, should have been given, at the very least, a significant time penalty for his antics—first for cutting the track and second for endangering his fellow riders—his only saving grace being his clash with DiFrancesco clearly wasn’t deliberate. I wish I could say the same for what happened later.
Put simply, Deegan’s actions in race two, where he took three deliberate and obvious stabs to knock down Jo Shimoda and thus take a third-straight 250 SMX crown, were downright shameful. You can slow the pace to bring other riders into the battle. That’s fine. But you can’t do what Deegan did. That’s not racing; that’s roller derby.
The teenager, seeing a possible $500,000 win bonus slipping away, let the red mist fully descend, blinding him to all sense and sensibility. But he broke the number-one rule of trying to take someone out: don’t get hurt doing it, or (okay, two rules) at least, don’t take yourself out.
Deegan’s broken collarbone was the result, and it now puts Team USA in jeopardy heading into the MXoN at Ironman Raceway in a few weeks’ time.
The real shame here, in my opinion, lies with the AMA.
Deegan was on probation after his clash with Cole Davies at the Denver Supercross earlier in the year, and so his riding in race two in Las Vegas saw the AMA dock him five points as a slap on the wrist, dropping him from fourth to fifth in the SMX standings and costing him roughly $50,000 in prize money.
Whoopdy-fricking-do.
While a lot to most, $50K is nothing to Deegan, and it showed the AMA has zero spine when it comes to making a stand against dangerous riding. I’m now more convinced than ever that it’s okay to use your motorcycle as a weapon in Supercross competition. Think back to Joey Savatgy and Zach Osbourne, or Justin Barcia and Malcolm Stewart. Had Deegan ridden with this malicious intent in any other form of motorcycle racing, a black flag, like Chad Reed saw after intentionally crashing Trey Canard during the Anaheim 2 Supercross in 2015, would have been the very minimum he could expect. Concerning the Reed/Canard incident, FIM Race Director John Gallagher, who made the decision to black flag Reed that night, said, “Not ever will we accept a rider taking matters into his own hands.” At the time, the AMA’s Kevin Crowther said that he and the AMA fully support Gallagher’s decision to take Reed immediately out of the race.
In Formula One, Michael Schumacher tried to take out Jacques Villeneuve during the 1997 final at Jerez and promptly beached himself in the gravel, Villeneuve going on to take the title. What happened to Schumacher? The FIA, Formula One’s governing body, deemed Schumacher’s move unsporting, resulting in him being stripped of all his championship points for that season. He was erased from the championship!
Incredibly, on this same past weekend as Deegan, we saw the same riding by Kay de Wolf in Australia, as he repeatedly punted off Simon Laengenfelder in a last-gasp effort to hang onto the MX2 World Championship crown. Like Deegan, it didn’t work, and he, too, tarnished his reputation as a result. Maybe it’s not just an AMA thing.
I will never lay claim to knowing the kind of pressure Deegan or de Wolf were under in their races over the weekend. No one can. But that doesn’t give you the right to set a precedent where it is okay to go after your rival in such a manner, especially in a sport that’s already risky enough.
A generation of kids watching will now think that if you can’t beat your rival, just take him out. No one will care, least of all the AMA. Is this motorcycle racing or the WWE? Sometimes I find it hard to tell the difference.
And before I go, a quick shout-out to those on social media who backed Deegan’s moves as simply, “He’s a racer, man!” “He just wants to win, man!” You know nothing about racing if you really think Deegan’s actions were acceptable.
Money will do strange things to a person’s brain, but that doesn’t excuse Deegan’s actions, and it certainly doesn’t excuse the AMA’s response to first the DiFrancesco incident and then to the repeated attacks on Shimoda.
Everyone involved in this sad state of affairs must do better, because the next time it happens (and it will), the injuries could be a lot worse than a concussion for one rider and a broken collarbone for another. CN
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