Marco Simoncelli

It is an oft cited justification that those who the Gods favour they take young. Marco Simoncelli had the appearance of the man most likely to succeed the current trio of top aces in the MotoGP world; Stoner, Pedrosa and Lorenzo. He was the heir apparent to the rock and roll legacy that Valentino Rossi has surely surrendered.

The second lap of the Malaysian GP saw the type of incident that has been mercifully absent from racing in recent memory and a young racer of immense talent and promise has been taken from us.

I’m not going to wax lyrical about how he was destined to be world champion because no-one can predict the future and how many young talents have been shackled with that pressure only to fall foul of circumstance and never be in a position to fulfil their imposed (or supposed) destiny.

But it was clear that Simoncelli was destined for something, be it absolute greatness or glorious failure. No way was he going to fade out unnoticed.  

Coming a bare week after the death of Dan Wheldon in America, the spotlight has once again been thrust upon motorsport for all the wrong reasons. Death or accident is never far away in motorsport and yet the prevailing sentiment is one of forgetfulness since the last time it happened. The show must go on, as the saying goes and whilst this has been proven time after time, in this day and age it continues to sound more and more callous.

What we do feel, in among all the hysteria, however, is nothing but clichés. Whilst we, the observers, sit in our armchairs and watch these gladiators defy gravity, life and death, it is easy to be lulled into a stupor of ignorance. We can watch someone jump off a building or out of a plane or take a corner at impossible angles and speed from the comfort of our own armchairs and completely remove ourselves from the reality involved.

Such is the power of television that we reduce the risks taken by our heroes to mere entertainment on our behalf, not understanding that these men and women are doing it from a belief more intense and inseparable from their beings than we would ever understand; the fact of entertainment does not even come into it for them. It is still a danger sport in which they participate but, to a man, the skill of doing something incredible and virtually unique transcends any understanding of what it might mean to a spectator or how it might affect them in the event of a crash.  

As always it was a freak accident that has no bearing on conceivable risk prevention scenarios. Nothing could have been done to prevent an accident that, in its detail, has happened a hundred times before but, because of the infinitesimal selections of chance, this time ended in tragedy.

The question will always be asked; when will it stop? And the answer is; never. Not whilst there are young men and women who will choose to risk their lives doing something they love. Will they ban mountaineering? Will they ban cross-ocean yachting? Of course they won’t.

And nor should they ban racing. Who are we, in this increasingly nanny-state world to dictate that a person shouldn’t do something because the outcome might upset our sensibilities or simply upset us? What more glorious ending can there be that someone died doing something they absolutely loved, understanding all the time the risks they were taking and the statistics that fluttered in the wind behind them like a flag.

Marco Simoncelli will be mourned and then will quietly fade into distant memory. I will defend his right to die as he wanted and for the racing to continue, as it has on hundreds, if not thousands of occasions previously, because, corny as it may be to say, he would have wanted it to be that way. Would he have refused to race on if it had been one of his companions? Of course he wouldn’t and that is why we must not mourn his death but celebrate his life.

It seems appropriate to quote the great Tazio Nuvolari at this point. Asked by an ignorant journalist how he got into a racing car time after time when it might mean his death, he simply replied; ‘tell me, do you think you might die, an old man, in your bed? Well then, how do you find the courage to climb into that bed every night?’ In every life, there is the risk of premature death. Hail to those who make the most of it, no matter how it may offend some people.