Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
Money Talks. MotoGP Listens
Changes are afoot in the upper echelons of MotoGP. Not at the front of the grid. No. More important than that. In the corridors and meeting rooms of middle management.
Last week, the great and the good of what is no longer Dorna—now renamed MSEG after last year’s purchase by Liberty Media—issued a crowing announcement. It revealed a raft of new appointments.
Four additions to the management team, all of which said a great deal about what has happened and what is continuing to happen to World Championship racing. And let nobody say it’s getting a bit top-heavy.
These management honchos have been cherry-picked from the world of business-sport. If you prefer, sport-business.
Actually, let’s go with the official title: Sport-entertainment. Contests as profit centers, whose unique selling point is the sporting enterprise of the super-talented, turned from risk and sweat and excellence into money. These people’s interest in that inspirational talent lies only in the bottom line. Handsome margins, value enhancement, and oodles of filthy lucre.
Sport and sportsmen exist to line their pockets. Fans exist for the same reason.
The four new appointments have impressive-sounding management titles: Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Revenue Officer and so on.
All four come from a range of big-money sports: from America’s NFL, Britain’s Premier League football (Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United), Formula One and UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship. I had to Google it. The pictures made me nervous. As well as purer entertainment: Discovery and Warner Brothers.
Now owner Liberty Media’s influence is written large, not least because, for the first time in some years, the appointees have not been drawn from Dorna boss Carmelo Ezpeleta’s close or extended family. This is the clearest marker that MotoGP has gone from being the Spanish mogul’s personal fiefdom to a much wider commercial enterprise. (Not knocking Carmelo. It was his vision that brought the sport to this position anyway.)
So what? Successful big business can’t hurt MotoGP and WorldSBK, can it?
Even if it does steer it away from its traditional European home toward far-away Asian countries where they sell more mopeds.
Even if it does treat elite riders like performing monkeys, paraded round the circuits in cheesy displays on flatbed trucks when they should be preparing for the race.
Even if it does cancel well-loved Phillip Island in favor of a potentially sterile city-park track in Adelaide.
And even if it does have a completely alien taste, compared with the very grown-up club racing that MotoGP used to resemble not that long ago.
This latest upgrade follows Dorna’s long and largely successful campaign emphasizing the entertainment side of the sport.
One important landmark was the threat of blackballing factory teams (remember production-based CRT of 2012 and 2013?). This forced Honda, Yamaha, et al. to offer works-level bikes to customer teams, as we see today.
Then a bevy of dumbed-down technical regulations. Control tires and control electronics are probably the most important, but there are other details: standard engine specs, four cylinders, with a controlled maximum bore size, and pages of stuff about gear ratios and bodywork.
Then the freezing of engine development, a rule that required fiddling via the concessions system, restoring technical and other freedoms to struggling constructors.
One of the given reasons was to control costs, but as importantly, it leveled the competition. It made top-level World Championship racing more equal.
(By the same principle, the Bolshoi Ballet company could have had lead weights installed in their dancing pumps so that less talented dancers might match their exploits. But that’s a whole other argument.)
Best of all, world-leading television techniques made the most of what we already knew was the world’s most exciting motorsport.
And let’s be fair. It’s worked.
Just look at this year’s championship, the closest and most varied in history. After 14 of 22 races, the title leaders were equal on points. More than that, going into the final third of the season, four or five potential winners still remain. This is quite unprecedented.
So, what’s the beef?
Don’t know, really. It just seems that something has been lost along with the gains. Something hard to define; perhaps it is authenticity. Or humanity. Something that somehow belittles the sportsmen, who risk so much, in just the same way as they did when racing wasn’t awash with strategy and revenue officers and money-grubbing middle managers.
Best welcome the money men and let them get on with it. Growing the sport will balance out the top-heaviness.
And bear in mind that the racing has never been better, or indeed safer.
Just remember who is paying for it. You and me.CN
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